Awarded Fight FinCrime Forum 2022
Fight FinCrime Forum has been crowned the winner of the Industry Partnership at the ICA Compliance Awards Europe 2023, recognising their outstanding contribution to combating financial crime and meeting high compliance standards. It is UK’s only awards recognising teams and individuals across the financial crime prevention and regulatory compliance community, designed to recognise the initiatives and achievements of the compliance community over the past 12-18 months.
The Award ceremony was attended by over 360 guests, bringing together regulatory and financial crime prevention professionals to celebrate the contributions of individuals and companies to combating financial crime and meeting high compliance standards. The evening celebrated the achievements of a total of 119 shortlisted finalists.
Selecting the winners for 2023 was an esteemed judging panel comprised of 66 senior compliance and financial crime prevention leaders from across the ICA membership, ICA subject matter experts and the wider compliance community. ICA President, Bill Howarth, commented: ‘We congratulate NatWest Group for their outstanding achievements and for driving excellence in financial crime prevention and compliance. We have been really impressed by the volume and quality of entries and congratulate all winners and highly commended entrants for being recognised for their collaboration, innovation, and dedication. Thank you to everyone who attended the ceremony last evening and we look forward to welcoming you again for another successful edition in 2024.’
From quiz to recognised conference
Fight FinCrime Forum 2022 was a free financial crime hybrid event co-organised by Fight FinCrime Community of Practice (FCCOP) supported by Polish branch of National Westminster Bank plc together with various financial crime compliance stakeholders. Event originally started in 2020 as a financial crime team quiz and was a grass-root idea stemming from a hackathon and aimed at building compliance culture and awareness through interaction across whole industry. The idea of mutual learning and common platform and building compliance culture as a crucial element of effective financial crime prevention across whole sector is the backbone of the concept.
To step it up and let it materialise in 2021 FCCOP invited NatWest Group and International Compliance Association (ICA) to be co-organisers of the event. To scale up the event four webinars on financial crime prevention have been added, to show different perspectives (two have been delivered by FCCOP’s members, two by external professionals including Tim Taylor from ICA). In result 2021 event gathered almost 1500 individuals from over 40 companies across 10 countries. Additionally, 25 teams were competing in the Fight FinCrime Quiz.
This year Forum has managed to attract more partners - NatWest Group, ICA, PwC Polska Warsaw, University of Technology, CIONET Polska, ASIS International and media partners: Money.pl and My Company Polska. Together they organised a whole day conference with multiple stages for over 5,000 both physical and online participants from 200 companies across 35 countries. The purpose of all involved stakeholders was to further engage and gather robust representation of experts from various areas of financial crime compliance space - regulators, law enforcement, professional associations, financial institutions, and consulting companies’ employees to share insights, inspire discussions, and show that all involved have the same goal - that public-private cooperation is crucial to tackle financial crime, and to ensure event will have the biggest possible reach. Topics included financial crime in Metaverse, human trafficking, SARs, current outlooks, crypto currencies. The focal point of a day was panel discussion on public-private cooperation in financial crime prevention involving former FCA director and now NatWest chairman Sir Howard Davies and representatives from ICA, FBI, and PwC. Since event was organised in Poland in order not to alienate Polish financial crime experts not proficient in English language and to avoid standard focus on biggest financial hubs two sessions by Polish Police and Polish Financial Intelligence Unit were delivered in Polish.
Organization of this event faced couple challenges. Firstly, post-pandemic audience was craving live networking event. Secondly, there was a struggle how to successfully fill the agenda of a little-known event. Finally, collecting and confirming representatives of all relevant areas: financial institutions and financial crime operations, regulators, financial intelligence units, law enforcement, academics and professional associations.
The marketing activities were delivered via various channels including Facebook, LinkedIn, multiple internal newsletters, articles in press, and word-of-mouth marketing resulted in incomparably wider reach of the event across different geographies, industries, and audiences.
Award winning Fight FinCrime Forum 2022
The event took place on 18th October 2022 in hybrid mode despite numerous uncertainties including Covid, war in Ukraine, and possible US shutdown, which would block FBI representative from coming. FCCOP successfully created a cross-industry knowledge sharing platform for financial crime compliance professionals, beginners, and wider public interested in the topic. Sessions varied from expert (e.g., NCA’s session on how to prepare SARs), to more general (e.g., FBI and Charity Commission anti-financial crime activities overviews, Polish Police session about impact of Covid on financial crime), to those of public interest (e.g., Prof. Witold Orlowski’s session on economic outlook and roots of crime). It successfully engaged both high profile experts (Sir Howard Davies, FBI director Michael Birley, Shilpa Arora from ACAMS and Pekka Dare from ICA) and more rank-and-file staff from NCA, NatWest Group, ING, and PwC in preparation and delivery of sessions.
This partnership provided a synergy which resulted in turnout exceeding all assumptions and expectations. The first edition of Fight FinCrime organised by FCCOP gathered only 200 participants from several companies across Poland, UK, and India. Second edition, which was first venture into partnership, resulted in almost 1500 individuals from over 40 companies across 10 countries. Fight FinCrime Forum 2022 gathered over 5000 unique attendees (around 350 physically in Warsaw), from around 200 companies, from 35 countries, meaning 1150%, 500%, and 1100% raise in number of participants, companies, and countries since 2020, and 700%, 775%, and 250% respectively since 2021.
The Fight FinCrime Forum starting off as a NatWest oriented team quiz thanks to hard work and passion evolved into the biggest financial crime event ever organised in Poland and probably one of the biggest admission free events for financial crime experts from around the world.
The next steps are to further develop the event and extend themes to include environmental crimes, ESG and climate risk sessions. The further goal for the Forum is to become a base for creation of a cross-industry compliance think tank.
Fight FinCrime Forum in Compliance
This is the first event in Poland that brought so many financial crime compliance professionals in one platform, providing the opportunity to learn about recent market trends, international regulatory and legislative developments, best implementation practices, and hear about latest solutions from experts from across the regulatory, law enforcement, innovators, and providers in the financial crime space that they would not otherwise be able to access in one stop shop.
Fight FinCrime Forum 2022 sparked a discussion around the force behind networking within the financial crime compliance space. Conference showed that there is a crave for more opportunities for learning from each other, connecting and debate. In-person networking enables the free flow of thoughts and ideas, favours development of innovative solutions and enhances our abilities to stop criminals from using the financial system to commit crimes against people, families, and businesses.
Employees from NatWest Group in Poland have created platform which, let’s hope, will grow organically and develop further to support mature compliance culture across the board. Fight FinCrime Forum 2022 was about networking, collaboration & diversity in fighting against financial crime –the same principals should be replicated in any business sector where multiple stakeholders are required to achieve notable results.
Winning an ICA Award, an internationally recognised association and training provider, helps to not only build Fight FinCrime Forum reputation, but it will also shape many careers for years to come and strengthen the credibility of compliance within financial crime prevention.
Form more information about next Fight FinCrime Forum 2023 please visit: fightfincrime.pl/
