Counterterrorism Blog

This week, I attended one of the most important annual conferences on money laundering prevention and enforcement, at which Dennis Lormel spoke on a panel on credit card use and exploitation by terrorists. Federal financial regulators announced the issuance of new regulations requiring certain U.S. insurance companies to comply with the Bank Secrecy Act, as amended by the USA PATRIOT Act. Other regulations governing correspondent banking relationships, long awaited and debated in the international financial community, remain "very close" to issuance, but I understand that the community is still fighting the new burdens that these regulations will impose.

I also examined products offered by WorldCheck, Factiva, RDC, and others (many more than just two years ago) in preventing money laundering and reporting suspicious transactions to regulators and law enforcement. Many are targeting the small- and medium-sized financial institutions which cannot afford to design an in-house solution. Experian, with years of experience in the field and a long history of handlng sensitive data, announced the release of such a product at the conference. SAS, which protects data stored by hundreds of financial institutions and government agencies, announced its own scalable, web-hosted product for smaller financial institutions. The new insurance and pending correspondent banking regulations will create more markets for these vendors.