Striking the balance between FinCrime, Privacy Law, and Encryption - What needs to change?

Efforts to tackle financial crime and requirements to protect privacy can seem conflicted and, in some cases, drive opposite regulatory expectations for the private sector. Increasingly, entities regulated for anti-money laundering (AML) are drawing large amounts of information from third parties to understand customer FinCrime risks.

Public-private partnerships have also risen to prominence as a leading tool for detecting financial crime; relying on intensive information-sharing between law enforcement agencies and larger financial institutions. In the 2020s, collaborative analytics and utilities, operating across multiple financial institutions in close to real-time, are emerging as a key area of innovation to support the identification and disruption of Financial Crime.

• How can these information-sharing trends square with the increasing strength of privacy and data sovereignty laws around the world? • Are we reaching a breaking point for policy tensions between AML and privacy?
• How can greater coherence between the two policy spheres be achieved? • What role can advances in encryption and ‘privacy enhancing technologies’ play to resolve these tensions?

Nick Maxwell, Head of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) ‘Future of Financial Intelligence Sharing’ research programme, will shed light on these questions and update us on the very latest research in this area.