MLRO / compliance officer
Written for the person on the other side of the report. The emphasis is on detection quality, escalation, and the enabler risk that sits inside your own firm — including the boardroom decisions that turn a warning into a filing or a silence.
Establishes the working vocabulary; money laundering, IFF, aggressive tax planning, tax evasion, corruption proceeds, and situates each within the global financial system.
Shared vocabulary with your regulator and your FIU.
How financial institutions and Designated Non-Financial Businesses and Professions (DNFBPs) are meant to identify their customers and detect suspicious behaviour, and where the process fails.
KYC, CDD and red flags — the operating core of the role.
Maps the institutional scaffolding of global AML/CFT, FATF's standard-setting role, the FSRB network, the mutual evaluation cycle and the ICRG listing process — using South Africa's 2023 greylisting and 2025 delisting as the organising case.
Mutual evaluation findings become your supervisor's inspection questions.
Dissects the plumbing of cross-border payments; nostro/vostro relationships, nested correspondents, message-field forensics and the 2025 revisions to payment transparency, and shows how de-risking has reshaped African corridors.
Correspondent and nested relationships: your largest single exposure.
Covers VASP obligations, mixers and chain-hopping, cross-chain bridges and stablecoin rails, the travel rule's uneven global rollout, MiCA, CARF/DAC8, and the evidential strengths and limits of on-chain tracing.
Virtual-asset exposure now reaches almost every institution indirectly.
Examines the cash-heavy end of laundering typologies most familiar to Southern and East African practitioners — front businesses, hawala settlement, mobile-money agent networks and bulk cash smuggling. Builds the investigative techniques needed where the paper trail is thin and the value trail is mostly physical or informal.
Cash, IVTS and mobile money — the retail edge of the same problem.
Examines the gatekeeper professions that design and operate layering schemes, trust and company service providers, nominee networks, and law-firm client accounts; the legal-privilege boundary carved out by the CJEU, and how layering is actually project-managed as a service.
Professional intermediaries, including the ones who are your clients.
The largest, least-detected laundering channel: moving value under cover of legitimate trade flows.
Trade finance red flags that documentary checks alone will not surface.
Examines how raw suspicious-transaction reporting becomes disseminable financial intelligence — through triage, network analysis, monitoring-model governance and lawful data sharing — and equips analysts to judge the quality of each stage.
Analytics: tuning detection so alert volume stops drowning the signal.
Designing the analytics function of a revenue authority or FIU, risk-scoring and its failure modes, data protection limits after the CJEU BO-register rulings, measuring effectiveness against FATF's 11 Immediate Outcomes, greylisting dynamics, corruption of the enforcement function itself, and whistleblower protection.
Programme design and metrics — how effectiveness is actually measured.