Anti-Corruption (Session 5) - Fighting Money Laundering: The Use of Data for Financial Intelligence

Gallery

Many countries struggle with accessing, verifying and analyzing financial data and beneficial ownership information to tackle corruption, money laundering and other financial crimes, even if such data is publicly available. What tools can we suggest to countries to increase their effectiveness in identifying and verifying beneficial ownership and enhance the transparency of companies and trusts? How can big data, technology and artificial intelligence more broadly be developed and used to identify suspicious activities and trace illegal assets? Join the Challenge!

Join the conversation: #anticorruption #IMFChallenge

Moderator

Emmanuel Mathias, Deputy Unit Chief, Legal Department, International Monetary Fund

Emmanuel Mathias is a deputy of the Financial Integrity Group of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s Legal Department. At the Fund, he has been coordinating the work on financial integrity issues in the context of surveillance and lending. He has overseen anti-money laundering and anti-corruption issues in the context of the Fund-supported programs for Greece, Cyprus and Ukraine.

Prior to joining the IMF in 2005, Emmanuel served as a researcher in economics at the University of Paris – Pantheon Sorbonne, was trained as a Customs special agent, and worked for the French financial intelligence unit. In this capacity he led investigations of several high-profile international cases of laundering of proceeds of drug trafficking, arms smuggling, corruption and human being trafficking.

Emmanuel holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Paris – Pantheon Sorbonne. He graduated from the Institute of political studies of Strasbourg, and was admitted to the French national school of administration (ENA).

Panelists

Yara Esquivel Soto, Senior Financial Sector Specialist, World Bank

Yara Esquivel is an attorney with more than fifteen years of experience in the investigation of fraud and corruption. She has a master’s degree in International Human Rights Law from Oxford University. She was an anti-corruption prosecutor in her native Costa Rica, where she investigated a former head of State. Ms. Esquivel has been a fraud and corruption investigator for the United Nations in Africa and the World Bank in Latin America. She currently works with the Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative (StAR), a partnership between the World Bank and the United Nation’s Office on Drug and Crime, providing technical assistance and policy advice on the recovery of proceeds of corruption. Ms. Esquivel works on anti-money laundering and terrorism financing and asset recovery in the Horn of Africa. She led the Bank’s first work on illicit flows, on the effects of the cocaine trade on the economy in Colombia.

Eric Kringel, Managing Director- Global Head of AML Monitoring Risk Management Program, Citi

Prior to joining Citi in March 2017, Eric served nearly 20 years in various U.S. Government roles. Immediately prior to joining Citi, he spent five years as Senior Counsel and the Bank Secrecy Act Specialist in SEC’s Division of Enforcement. Eric spent 2005-2012 at the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) where he served as Senior Advisor in the Analysis and Liaison Division, Acting Assistant Director of the Office of Law Enforcement Support, and as Senior Policy Advisor to three consecutive Directors. Prior to that Eric served as an attorney in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms’ Office of Chief Counsel for five years, and a contract attorney in the Department of Justice’s Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section for two- and one-half years. Eric is a graduate of the University of Nebraska and American University’s Washington College of Law.

Barry MacKillop, EGMONT Group for Financial Intelligence Units

Mr. MacKillop is the Deputy Director of Intelligence at the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) responsible for Tactical Financial Intelligence, as well as Targeted Strategic Financial Intelligence. Mr. MacKillop also has extensive experience in developing and implementing anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing Compliance programs and policies. Prior to this, Mr. MacKillop worked at Public Safety Canada where he held various senior positions over nine years, including: Director General of Law Enforcement, Organized Crime and Border Strategies; Senior Director of National Strategies (Serious and Organized Crime); and Director of Summit Security, Contract Policing and Firearms Policy.

Mr. MacKillop began his career in the non-profit sector with the Youth Services Bureau of Ottawa and has also held positions in other federal government organizations, including both the Privy Council Office and Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. Mr. MacKillop holds a Master of Arts Degree in Criminology from the University of Ottawa.

Mark Weber, MIT IBM Watson AI Lab

Mark Weber conducts applied research and leads the Advanced Prototyping Team at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, a $250 million partnership founded in 2017. The lab has 50 active projects co-led by MIT faculty and IBM Research scientists who are among the world's leading AI researchers.

Through the lab's membership program, which Mark leads, companies and strategic partners work with the lab to bridge fundamental research to real-world impact.

Prior to IBM Research, Mark was a fellow at the MIT Legatum Center for Development & Entrepreneurship while he earned his MBA in finance from MIT Sloan. At the MIT Media Lab, advised by former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson, he led a research engagement with the Mexican Ministry of Finance and the Inter-American Development Bank. Conducting field work in Mexico and Ukraine, Mark's team developed a new open-source protocol for blockchain-based warehouse receipts in agricultural supply chains. In a paper published in the Journal of Management Science, Mark and his colleagues explain how such a protocol could be used to improve access to credit for small-medium enterprises (SME) through inventory transaction signaling.