Saying It as You See It: How to Lose Friends and Infuriate People
Money laundering compliance kills start-ups, wastes good technology, and banks spend trillions with 0.1% impact. But the flip side of failure is opportunity
In US Senate testimony, ex-US Treasury special agent John Cassara quoted me describing money laundering controls as the world’s least effective anti-crime measure.
Start-ups, banks, and other firms know they must comply with relevant regulations, but it’s less well known that the modern anti-money laundering experiment has almost zero impact on criminal finances.
For every “Billion Dollar Whale” uncovered, thousands operate unseen. Every few weeks one “Dark Towers” bank or another (and another, last week) appear in the cross-hairs of regulators keen to ‘prove’ their “tough on crime” credentials — yet the harsh reality is that it’s never been shown to make a serious dent in crime. (Even the World Bank can’t stop a sizable chunk of its own payments to governments being spirited away into financial havens, according to The Economist (and report and commentary).
