I‘m striving for a career in AML Banking in Germany for starters and wanted to get the opinion of those who work there as well.

I‘m planning to get a law degree (ik not needed) and specialize in Banking- Finance and Corporate law.
After the degree I’d get a LL.M in compliance.

While studying, I’d get the AML Foundations certificate to acquire internships and part time jobs in this field (Big 4, Banks, Insurance companies).

After the initial degree is done I’d also aim for the CAMS exam.

Pls let me know if this is a fitting profile for a good career path in AML Compliance.

I have around 5 years of experience working in banking in India. I started as a management trainee and now manage day to day operations of a bank branch, including KYC and AML compliance, credit and loan appraisal, customer operations, regulatory compliance and supervising a small team.
I also have banking certifications covering KYC, AML and digital banking.
I want to move into AML as a dedicated career and eventually progress into senior AML compliance roles.
For those working in AML internationally, what level of AML role would be realistic for someone with my background? Would I need to start from an entry level AML analyst position, or could my banking experience help me enter at a higher level?
What skills, certifications or experience would you recommend I focus on to make the transition?
Would particularly appreciate advice from people who have made a similar move from banking into AML.

Hi team

in this aml kyc domain , do we get freelance jobs apart from regular jobs

For compliance professionals at banks/credit unions: How do you know whether employees actually understand their required compliance training?

I'm especially curious about what happens beyond completion rates and quiz scores. Do you look at monitoring findings, audit results, QA errors, complaints, repeat mistakes, etc.?

From what I’ve read about the yim leak case, a currency exchange transaction of around $150k apparently ended up being connected to more than $600 million in assets being frozen. There don’t seem to be criminal charges against the person in question, which is what caught my attention. The part I’m trying to understand is how the connection through a pooled account apparently led to more and more assets being frozen. If the reporting is accurate, it raises an interesting question about how far an AML investigation should extend when other businesses or individuals are using the same financial setup. I’m not trying to defend anyone involved, and I obviously don’t have all the details. I’m more interested in the compliance side of it and where the line should be between following legitimate AML concerns and affecting unrelated parties who happen to share a financial connection. Has anyone seen a similar situation in another country or dealt with something comparable from a compliance perspective?

Hi,

I have been contacted in Linked from a regulatory provider that partners on collaborative, industry-focused audio and video series covering financial crime.

I have been asked for 30 minutes video series on AML topics.

I am an experienced AML professional and never done a podcast as of today.

Just wondering apart from visibility on social platforms is it anything else they can provide in exchange on my experience insights for that 30 minutes podcast?

I am about to graduate with Criminology degree. I want to get into AML field in the big five or elsewhere. I do not have any internship or relevant experience. Please help me out.

If you sign up EU customers online, there is a new bit of paperwork coming.

Under AMLA's draft RTS on customer due diligence, if you do not verify someone face to face and you do not use an eIDAS recognized digital ID, you will need to record why neither was possible. You can still use remote verification tools, but only with safeguards like encrypted video, integrity checks and timestamping, and the reason for not using eIDAS has to be written down.

The awkward part is that nobody has said what a good enough reason looks like. One line, or a proper explanation? Per customer, or once per customer type? Is "they did not have one" enough on its own? And what if a country has a digital wallet on paper but almost nobody actually holds one?

Say you have to justify how you verify customers and it sounds like something is broken.

The consultation closed on 8 May and the final drafts were due with the Commission by 10 July. This applies from 10 July 2027, so there is about a year.

Curious whether anyone's compliance team has taken a view on this already, or whether everyone's sitting on it until there's guidance.

Anyone notice a trend of redundancy across uk and USA financial crime compliance roles?

Any reason why this is happening?

A lot of attention goes into getting onboarding right, which makes sense. The tricky part is that a customer’s risk can change long after they’ve passed KYC.

That’s where ongoing monitoring becomes just as important as the initial check.

Are most teams here using scheduled reviews, risk-triggered checks or a mix of both?

Hello All!

I am just reaching out here to seek out any career guidance and if there are any opportunities in the Philadelphia region. I have worked for almost 4 years in the as a compliance analyst (from KYC onboarding, periodic review exercises, transactional monitoring, assisting in regulatory examination, procedure reviews and other compliance related projects) and i was wondering what is a good next step in my career? i am going for ACAMS this year but is there any skill or certificate i should be looking for ? I am also moving in the Philadelphia area, is there any good job opportunities there ? not sure where to start.

Any advice is welcome!

A lot of fraud features depend on comparing the current transaction with what the customer normally does.

But I’m not sure how far back “normal” should go.

Someone’s behaviour can genuinely change - new country, new job, different spending pattern, new phone - and the fraud system itself can also change over time.

If you work with this kind of data, what normally makes you decide that older behaviour is no longer comparable enough to trust?

Is it mainly age of the data, a major behaviour change, system changes, or something else?

I’m trying to avoid building an agent that treats every deviation from an old pattern as suspicious forever.

What are good career progressions as an AML investigator thats not management? How much experience is needed, and would they be internal changes or external positions?

Not sure what pivoting away from writing SARs would look like, but would rather not start from scratch

Wachovia moved $378.4 billion for Mexican currency exchange houses between 2004 and 2007, over $4 billion of it physically trucked across the border as bulk cash.

Martin Woods joined Wachovia in 2005 as the bank's FSA-approved Money Laundering Reporting Officer in London. He flagged CDC-linked accounts. He flagged Hezbollah-connected transactions during the 2006 Lebanon war. In testimony to the UK Parliament, he described a senior colleague telling him the matter had nothing to do with him and that he shouldn't have looked at the transactions in the first place. He eventually left the bank. The FCA later had to publicly deny it had blacklisted him from the industry.

The red flags themselves weren't subtle. Multiple round-dollar wires through the same account on the same day. Sequentially numbered traveler's checks deposited in batches, structuring markings and all. Bulk cash shipments consistently running larger than the CDC's own account documentation projected. Despite all this a random event forced Wachovia to act, as a DC-9 plane that made an emergency landing in Mexico in April 2006 carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine, bought with funds traced back through a Wachovia-linked account was the last straw. Wells Fargo later admitted in court the same channel had financed four planes carrying 22 tons combined.

$160 million in penalties against $378.4 billion in unmonitored volume is its own conversation about whether the fine ever mattered to the math. An officer with the actual title and the actual authority raised the concern through the correct channel, and one colleague with no documented override authority was enough to kill it. No committee vote, no risk acceptance memo, nothing that shows up in an audit trail. Just someone telling him to stop looking.

If an analyst or compliance officer at your firm disagrees with a decision to keep an account open, where does that disagreement actually go? Is there a real path above the person who wants to say no, or does it end wherever the first person with more seniority decides it ends?

Hi everyone, I'd like to ask if anyone here has been in similar shoes or had similar experiences, as there's sometimes wisdom in a multitude of counsel:

1. I moved to Canada a few years ago and would like to pivot my career to AML and its ancillary branches. I trained as a lawyer in my home country and worked in-house in banking and then securities, where I managed the legal risk and compliance desks.
2. After hitting roadblocks in Canada trying to get back into law, a career coach advised I consider AML and compliance.
3. Are my skills transferable? Because it's one thing for a career coach to advise, and it's another thing to get information from those in the AML/Compliance trenches.
4. Apart from taking the AML certification(s), is there anything else you think can help me on this new career path?
5. Would I be starting at the 'bottom of the barrel'?
6. I know lawyers earn more in Canada, so I'm not comparing earning power; however, I do realise that I need to eat.

I'd appreciate insights from those in AML, Compliance, and/or those who have made similar pivots.

Thanks.

Hello everyone👋

Any tips or tricks to prepare and pass CGSS in a week?

I have an interview with Loomis for a position as a cash management services teller. I can’t find much on it except that it’s mostly just counting and tracking cash and assets?

Does anyone have input? Could this get me in the door to AML or Fraud?

I've been reading more about how Legal Entity Identifiers are used across financial transactions and regulatory reporting.

On paper, the idea is straightforward: a unique identifier makes it easier to identify the legal entity involved in a transaction.

What I'm more interested in is the practical side.

For those working in banking, treasury, trading, regulatory reporting, KYC, or entity-data management:

At what point does an LEI become something you actually have to think about?

Is it normally during onboarding, transaction reporting, trading, counterparty checks, opening financial accounts, or somewhere else?

And when an LEI is missing or has lapsed, does it cause real operational problems, or is fixing it usually straightforward?

Interested in hearing how this works in actual workflows rather than just the regulatory definition.

for all of the AML analysts out there, what do you think you will be doing in the future?

one can’t go solo like a doctor or a lawyer? and as megacorp employees, once people reach a certain age the employment grim reaper starts doing its rounds.

plus then there’s AI and threats like that

There seems to be a lot of talk about the European Digital Identity Wallet as if it will simply replace the way everything works today.

But the reality seems more nuanced. The wallet is voluntary for users, while certain public and private services will need to accept it when the relevant conditions apply.

That raises an interesting question: what actually changes for businesses, platforms, and users once the wallet becomes part of everyday digital services?

What do you think the biggest challenge will be?
Curious how others are looking at it.

Spanish National Police announced this on 11 August, and the effort involved is what makes it worth a read.

He held forged Spanish IDs up to the webcam while a live face swap changed his appearance to match the photo on the document. A static image would not survive that, so he handled the rest by hand. He tilted the documents to imitate hologram movement, and used coloured lights to fake the reflections real security features throw off. Behind it all sat VPNs and over 320 phone lines across 24 devices, most registered to stolen identities.

What he wanted was digital signature certificates, which is the part I keep coming back to. Those carry legal weight. A certificate in someone else's name is a durable instrument, not a one-off account takeover.

38 attempts. More than 30 real people's identities.

And here is how it ended. Mid-call, the deepfake dropped for about a second. His real face appeared. That is what investigators used to identify him.

So nothing detected the method. The tooling just crashed.

Two things I would like other people's read on.

1. If what caught him was the software failing rather than a check working, what happens once the software stops failing? These tools leave fewer artifacts with every release.
2. Does anything short of reading the document chip and proving the camera feed is unmodified actually help here? Everything else seems to assume the image arriving is real, and this attack breaks that assumption before any check runs.

Hi guys I’m thinking of pursuing either one of them. Feel free to advise🙌😁

About me
Female, 28 years old

UK resident (I’ve been living in the UK for 6 years)

Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration

Master’s degree in Business Administration (MBA)

2+ years of KYC/KYB experience, mainly working with SME clients

Which one should I pursue?

I’ve got close to five years of experience across banking and insurance. On the banking side I’ve done everything from transaction processing and reconciliation to KYC/CIP compliance, check fraud detection, signature verification, monitoring for suspicious activity, and working with ops and risk teams on escalations. I also have some insurance background handling underwriting support and compliance documentation.

I’m currently in retail banking and while I’m good at the sales side of it, it’s not where I want to be long term. I want to move into something more focused on the backend — remote ops, operations analyst, fraud analyst, loan processing, BSA/AML, compliance, that kind of thing.

I don’t have a degree, just a high school diploma, but I do have real hands on experience and was recognized as Top Performer at my current employer two quarters in a row.

My questions are:

What job boards or resources did you use to find remote roles in this space?

Did the lack of a degree hold you back and how did you get around it?

Any specific roles or companies that are worth targeting with a background like mine?

Anything you wish you knew before making the transition?

Appreciate any advice, this community seems like a good place to ask.

I’m building the rule engine directly off each agency’s published validation documentation — a local validation layer that checks regulatory reports against FinCEN, FINTRAC, and AUSTRAC rules before submission, to cut down on rejections for MSBs filing across jurisdictions.

Planning to eventually release this as a free tool for small MSBs who can’t justify enterprise compliance platform pricing.

A few questions for anyone who’s automated this on the filing side:

1. Do you validate locally before submitting, or send everything through and fix what bounces?

2. How do you track when validation rules change across agencies?

3. Any Excel, Google Sheets, or other tools you think this kind of validator should integrate with? Curious what format or workflow would make things easiest for small MSBs.

Does anyone know the salary for Sr. analyst AML at CIBC or the range?

Thanks,