We spoke to Craig Tim, Senior Director of AML at ACAMS (Association of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists). Craig has more than 15 years of anti-financial crime experience across both public and private sectors including senior roles at the Department of Justice and Bank of America.

Tell us about yourself

I am currently the Senior Director of AML at ACAMS and a member of the ACAMS global Thought Leadership team. ACAMS is a leading international membership organization dedicated to fighting global financial crime. We provide opportunities and platforms for anti-financial-crime (AFC) training, knowledge-sharing, and professional development to our more than 100,000 members across 180 jurisdictions.

I previously served on the Global Financial Crime team at Bank of America as Managing Director, Emerging Risk, Strategic Initiatives, and Government Liaison Executive, engaging directly with FinCEN, OCC, the Fed, and US Treasury, bridging the gap between the public and private sectors to combat financial crime. Before that, I oversaw AML programs in my role as Managing Director, Global Wealth and Investment Management AML Compliance Executive, also at Bank of America.

What are your areas of expertise?

Before my roles at Bank of America, I was at the US Department of Justice as Deputy Chief of the Money Laundering and Bank Integrity Unit, working with foreign and domestic regulators. This lent me particular expertise in money-laundering and asset-forfeiture prosecution and is part of why I’m working with ACAMS today.

What do you most like about your work?

Within my role at ACAMS, I have a large focus on money laundering, of course, but I’ve had the opportunity to home in on global transparency initiatives and beneficial ownership regulation lately, which has been quite exciting. I think we at ACAMS have the unique opportunity to sit at the nexus of private and public partnership, providing AFC professionals with the training and tools to tackle the latest financial crimes and change the culture of compliance within their institutions, and I really love that part of my work.

It’s really special getting to sit down with AFC professionals and regulators alike to hear the challenges they’re facing and learn what we as a compliance community are doing is helping to shed light on these horrific crimes and ultimately improve our societies.

What are the main challenges in the fight against financial crime?

There’s already a lot of really fantastic work being done across the private sector and across global governments and member organizations that shouldn’t go unnoticed, but it’s the nature of the problem — there isn’t enough awareness and education about these issues.

In my career and now in my work at ACAMS, I’ve seen a breadth of financial-crime issues and I have to say that, especially in the wake of COVID, we’re seeing a rise in crimes using digital assets for money laundering, sanctions evasion, and pig-butchering scams — things that have a very digital-native footprint. It’s popping up during a time when the laws and regulations are trying to catch up and AFC professionals are in need of education on the latest technologies and trends.

What are you looking forward to most, and what worries you?

Following the horrific invasion and ongoing war in Ukraine, we’ve seen a great deal of global cooperation where things may have been less united previously. These geopolitical issues have also brought many financial crimes, like money laundering, sanctions evasion, human trafficking, and more to the public’s attention. That’s driving greater awareness beyond the offices of AFC professionals.

As global interests continue to focus on these crimes, we at ACAMS are hopeful that the light being shone on these challenges will help provide AFC professionals with more resources as financial institutions see them as central to the fight against financial crime.

You can follow Craig Timm on LinkedIn.