Investigator / FIU analyst
Built around the working question of an investigator: where did the money come from, where did it go, and what can I prove. The sequence front-loads tracing mechanics and holds programme-level policy until the end, where it belongs for this role.
Establishes the working vocabulary; money laundering, IFF, aggressive tax planning, tax evasion, corruption proceeds, and situates each within the global financial system.
Triage first. Charging the wrong category is the most common way a good file dies.
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.
Red flags are the raw material of every referral you will read or write.
Traces the legal architecture connecting an underlying crime to the money that flows from it, from the FATF designated categories and self-laundering through serious tax crime, tracing doctrine and civil forfeiture, to the evidential chain a prosecutor must build.
Predicate-to-proceeds reasoning is the spine of the eventual charge sheet.
How anonymous corporate structures are built, why they are so effective, and how to pierce them.
Shell structures are where most tracing stops unless you know how they are built.
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.
Wire chains and nesting: the mechanics you will spend most of your time reading.
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.
Chain analysis is now routine, not exotic; blockchain evidence must be handled correctly.
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 and typology detection turn a pile of reports into a network hypothesis.
The largest, least-detected laundering channel: moving value under cover of legitimate trade flows.
Trade-based laundering appears in the majority of cross-border corridor cases.
How intelligence, information and evidence actually move between states; MLAT practice, Egmont FIU exchange, exchange of information on request versus CRS/CARF automatic exchange, joint audits, and how to draft a request that gets answered.
Cooperation and evidence admissibility decide whether your tracing survives court.
The full recovery pipeline from tracing to restraint to confiscation and return — non-conviction-based confiscation, UNCAC Chapter V, the StAR Initiative, the EU's 2024 asset-recovery Directive, Swiss and UK restitution practice, GFAR return principles, and the politics that stall repatriation.
Asset recovery is the outcome the public actually sees; plan for it from day one.
Turning transactional evidence into court-usable proof of an offence.
Forensic reconstruction, so your file speaks the language the prosecutor needs.
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.
Optional for the role, but useful if you brief management on institutional metrics.