Danique van Koppenhagen - Detecting Financial Crime in the 2020's: Hand in Hand

Good morning. If you've been a victim of crime at any point in your life, please put up your hand.

Yeah, that's quite a love hands going up. Often when I do this in the Netherlands, you start hearing people grumbling about their bikes being stolen.

For me, it wasn't my bike being stolen. And it took me quite a long time to actually be a victim of crime. I was 25 and at that point I was living in London. You can imagine being 25, working in the financial industry in London, living the city life, living the dream, you just made a promotion. I was about to go into a high, high powered meeting, which I prepared very well with some senior executives. And then my Houseman called I ignored the goal. Cause I was about to go into the meeting, but then he called again, probably I should pick up.

So I picked up the phone and he says, Donique you have to come to our house. We've been broken. And I don't know if any of you who put up your rents recognize this feeling, this sort of gut wrenching feeling that you get when you get a message like that. So I run away from the meeting.

I go, I'm sorry. I have to go up. And verbal said leaving all of them behind in the room and be like, no, no, I gotta go home. I went outside, waved down a black taxi, cuz that's what you do in London. Thankfully it was midday. So I wasn't about to get stuff and said the traffic, I told the taxi driver, can I pay my card? I don't have cash on me. And he's like, no, no, but, but I'll drive you past the, cashpoint just get in the car. I'll get you home. No worries. So I'm in that taxi still with that sort of gut wrenching feeling. I'm sure what I'll find.

When I get home, he drives me past the cashpoint. He takes me home and there I arrive and this is what I find glass shattered throughout our kitchen. Someone had knocked in the window, opened the door from the inside and gotten into the house. And then the process really starts cuz I had to go through the house and I had to list what was missing for the insurance. And very quickly I realize that it wasn't about the stuff that I was missing. It wasn't just the fact that I needed to move laptop.

It was about the things that, that stuff representeded, the jewelry that I was missing, that I'd been given by my grandparents, the laptop, which had pictures that I might not be able to replace cuz I hadn't yet printed them and I hadn't always backed them up. And I imagine that all of you have laptop like that somewhere and think, oh yeah, I probably should make it back up every once in a while. And then suddenly you get that feeling in your gut. I might have been too late. So some of those pictures were the pictures right behind me.

And they were the pictures of the first strip to a formula, one circuit that I took together with my brother. Now this was the first strip that we took with the two of us. So that was already very special to me. And it was also the first strip to formula one. I'm an added formula one fan. I still follow it. Thankfully my little brother still have the pictures on his computer. So those pictures I was able to recover.

Now working as a management consultant for Andros detecting financial crime department, I realized that where that stuff represented more than just things for me, it probably represented something different for whoever burled my house as well, because I'm pretty certain that whoever burled my house steal my jewelry, cuz he thought it was the prettiest jewelry ever and would go around on the streets, wearing it and showcasing. It looked what I found and pretty certain that in whoever took my laptop will not have been going, oh this has the newest version on the Sims on it.

So I'll take this one and I'll play it for the entire evening. And I'm definitely pretty certain that my collectional romance novels that I had on my Kindle were what, whoever that person was, was looking for, that person was looking for something to make into money. He was looking for something to actually sell. And this type of money that's been made from criminal activities is abundant in our society. But once whoever does these kind of things gets that money or gets these things.

They need to have it to reenter the normal ecosystem because criminal money is just that, but buying a house with it or buying a car with it or doing anything else with it, for that, we need to make sure that it gets back into what we call the financial ecosystem And that's money laundering. Now, traditionally, when we talked about buy laundering, we might have been talking about these types of long dreads.

I think there have been case studies in the past that showed that money, laundry was abundant there and they didn't just put the money in the laundry to see, you know, what color it could take. What would happen is it would be a legitimate front business, but the profits that would be reported into the tax system and then filed would be much higher than you could ever make. Even if you had all these laundry machines running day and night with people paying for them. And what we see is that the types of constructions that are being made to do this money laundering changes over time.

So with the European union, you get cross-border transactions and you get VT carousel where you have a product in the first country and then you sell it in the next country and then you resell it. And then one person does give the V a T to the tax and then the other person doesn't. And if you are very confused, then that's exactly what they want to obtain with those kind of schemes. They want to confuse the tax authorities on the source of the money so that they can bring it back through a seemingly legitimate business and do things with it.

Now, traditionally, one of the only players that would see all these types of transactions and they'll be able to track all these types of transactions were the banks. And that's why the banks have been entrusted with a gatekeeper role. They've been told in a string of anti-money laundering directives amongst each other, amongst others. I think we're now definitely potentially moving towards the double digits, AML 10. It's not that far away, even though it might sound like that. Now it's continuously thing.

But what we've also seen is that it's really, really hard and the there's been massive market failure in the Netherlands in Germany, in the UK on this topic, banks are struggling to get it right, but this struggle is not the only struggle that banks face. We've already heard it in the previous keynotes today.

Banks face regulatory challenges with PSE two and GDPR banks face cryptocurrency and other types of new technologies that will disrupt the industry and banks face new entrants, not just whoever is the, the newest kid on the block with a nice a, but actually also the GAAS the very big players that have the type of money and digital infrastructure that banks might have been a bit late in investing in. Now, there are definitely quite a lot of advantages working in banking apart from social financial reation that people keep talking about complicated types of things.

And one of them is that AB and Al allows us to take a sabbatical ones every five years. Me still being an average formula one fan. I planned my SED around the formula one race in Austin last year. So I made sure that, you know, all my flights were thus that I could visit it. And this is me there. Now for those of you who might looked very carefully at the first formula one pictures I showed there in the first formula, one pictures I was wearing the Ferrari t-shirt.

Whereas here I'm wearing a red bull cap and I'm not gonna lie in part that's because I'm still a Dutchy and max not driving for, for red bull. So that's who I'm now supporting. This is how these kind of things goes, But I'm not just talking about formula one today because you know, in these types of talks, you should share something personal with your audience. I'm talking about formula one today, because I think as the financial industry, where does it may sound? There's a lot for us to learn from formula one.

Now there's many comparisons that can be made between formula one and the financial industry, both of these sort of markets have very high entry costs. It's just as expensive, but well, potentially slightly less expensive, but it's still very expensive to start a racing team, just like it's expensive to become a player in the financial industry. It's a very regulated market. There's a lot of discussions. What should the rules be? Do the rules actually, you know, work for the competition. Do the rules allow for proper racing?

Like we wanna see it or do the rules, hamper competition, hamper takeovers. There's a governing body and formula one that makes decisions that sometimes hands out controversial benefit penalties that tells teams when they can't potentially drive anymore in the next season, that gives up licenses. And just like in the financial industry, when you build a car in formula one and you think this is a great car, you then have to adapt it for about 22 different circuits each year. And some of these circuits will be nice and easy and they'll be a relatively straight lines.

So pure hard racing power is important, but some of these circuits might have a lot of turns. So you need agility and you need to be able to adapt to those kind of things. So every time that you build a car, you have to set it up correctly. Just like when you have a financial product, you have to set it up. According to the rules and regulations of the countries you might go into now that this is no longer a purely national play game, gameplay formula one has sustainability demands. I think everyone in the financial industry recognizes that there's a lot of questions.

How sustainable is what you're doing. Are you investing in the right products? Are you actually working on sustainability and formula one has a lot of safety demands, just like the financial industry. Now in formula one, a lot of the imagery around high profile crashes led to new safety features being introduced. And these safety features were under discussion for a long time already, but it was the imagery that touched people in their guts of the crashes on the circuit that led to the introduction of the halo that you see on this picture. And the halo was actually quite controversial.

Cause many people said it's ugly. It disrupts the consumer experience. It's something else for them to look at. They don't wanna look at that. Similarly in the financial industry conversations about what if there's an extra step in the customer journey, what people don't like doing that. But another thing that imagery does is it can shock people into action. And we're seeing that in society as well. So how many of you, and I imagine everyone of you will probably have seen the governing pictures of the little child lying on the beach in the refugee prices.

And the question we should be asking each other is not just, how can we stop these people from coming into Europe, but it's also why is it profitable to put so many people on the boat and to bring them into Europe? Where is that money flowing? How come that that money is then allowed to re-enter the financial ecosystem and what are we going to do about this? So those types of societal demands, very rightly are being put on the financial industry, but it costs time. It costs money. It costs effort.

It requires something from your employees because it requires employees to not just be brilliant coders or ad builders, to not just know enough, a lot about one single piece of regulation or like formula one, not just to be aware of how a certain screw or how a tire goes onto the car, but to be aware why that screw or tire is important for the safety of the car, for the safety of the driver, it allows you to teach your employees, not just, it requires you to teacher your employees, not just about what their job is, but also the context in which their job takes place.

And the fact that there's a gatekeeper role for society, but it also allows the, it also requires those challengers coming onto the market who see the big pie of profits that the banks traditionally held and say, I want a piece of that pie to think about this too. Cuz the financial industry no longer is those banks. Who've been holding this gatekeeper long for a very long time. It's a lot of new players as well and all of these players need to step up.

So I challenge you here today, whether you are a regulator, a challenger or a traditional bank, if you work in financial regulation, give us vision. Don't just tell us, you have to open up for competition through PSD two on the one hand and then have another member of your regulatory team come to the bank and say, but you also are going to be held to a, to a higher standard than these entrances are. In terms of these types of safety requirements, merge your visions of different parts of the financial infrastructure and guide us along this journey. Cause we can't do it alone.

If you're a challenger or a new entry to the system, step up and take your responsibility because the financial industry is not just about profit. It plays a role in giving infrastructure to society, but also in keeping that society safe, compliance, isn't an afterthought. It should be part of your business case and you should be investing not just in the best voters or in the people who otherwise go over to Google.

Or if you arguable in the best voters like you've always done, you should look towards those people who understand the context of the financial industry and otherwise you should be teaching them that. And towards those people here from traditional banking, I ask you be proud because there's a lot that's being done throughout the financial industry to keep society safe. Share that story. Sharing the story of banking is hard and has been hard over the past decade or so, but this is one that's actually brilliant.

And whenever I walk into Amy and LL and I see all of the people working on detecting financial crime, that pride is something that seeps through whatever they're doing. We've recently worked together with a university to use algorithms to cash or to be better able to predict human trafficking and that's led to some real results. And that is actually the added value that we can bring towards society. Share that head of value and be proud. So back to formula one, cuz I can't resist. And thankfully I see some millennial attendance here in this room as well.

What else can we learn from formula one? And here I'd like to use the term for those of you. Who've seen me girls, I might be aware of this, the term frenemies. So this is Nico Roseberg and Lewis Hamilton who a few seasons back drove together in the Mercedes team in formula one. And they worked together with Mercedes to build the best car on the track, but then they competed hard on the circuit and they fought each other for the world title and for the world championship that entire year. Similarly Martin was talking earlier today about partnerships.

We have a Ferrari car here, but we also have an alpha Romeo car and a has car in this picture. And the reason why is because Alfa Romeo and has said, we can build a very good car, but we're not a good at building engines. So we're gonna buy the engine from Ferrari again, partnership, learn from each other. Don't try to do everything on your own.

A good example of this is the transaction monitoring, the Netherlands utility that was launched last week where AB and aro Rabobank and I N G and two other banks are gonna work together to do the transaction monitoring in a more centralized way because we're saying we need to cooperate there in order to make sure that the financial system is get safe. We're not going to compete on this essential element of our gate keeper role, but we're gonna work together for the good of society. Now there's a lot of talk about disruption. And I talked about my brother earlier in this talk as well.

And this again is my little brother, but then in a racing car that he built himself with the university of Phillip. And to me, this is the epitome of disruption because this is a electric racing car with quite enhanced safety features because in order to compete in formula E student safety comes first. And what my little brother showed me is that small steps matter. The formula E is actually disrupting formula one. Some of the winners and the champions from formula two are now likely to drive in formula E next year instead of formula one.

And those small steps that are being taken by a side set of players are likely to disrupt the industry that was so big and powerful. And that was the of driving throughout the sort of last decades. So today I ask you, take that small step yourself, go to one person, hear you in this room that you don't know and tell them I want to work with you to make the financial industry safer, ask them how can I help you? Thank If you create a very interesting talk.