Course Duration: 21 minutes
Course Points: 20
In this episode of Fridays with Fintelekt, Shirish Pathak, Managing Director, Fintelekt Advisory Services is in conversation with Sujata Dasgupta, Global Head – Financial Crimes Compliance Advisor, Tata Consultancy Services and leading industry expert on anti-financial crime.
Sujata traces the evolution of anti-financial crime and compliance departments of banks and financial institutions from the time they were integrated into ‘account opening’ to separate functions today. She speaks about the top three trends in the future based on her experience – around technology adoption, automation and collaboration. She also believes that workforce will need to be re-aligned and not replaced to stay up to speed with these evolving trends.
She also discussed regional differences in the awareness of AML/CFT and regulatory expectations, as well as differences across types of institutions. However, awareness and the importance of AML is increasing. Even during the Covid-19 pandemic, IT budgets were cut across the board for all types of companies. However, in Sujata’s experience, compliance budgets were not cut as financial institutions were battling higher fraud and financial crime activity.
In larger financial institutions, challenges to AML detection and prevention are created due to disparate processes, fragmented systems and data, which hinders the institutions from having a full, aggregated view of criminal activity.
Sujata also shared her views around the growth of Fintech and Regtech players and the competition vs. collaboration eco-system within IT product and services companies.