October 28, 2025
Today’s show is a first. I enjoyed it so much that I decided, mid-session, that we need another. So this is “We Can Beat Financial Crime, Part 1.” My guests are three leading innovators in the movement to create a new, high tech, vastly better way to turn back the rising tide of illicit finance, money laundering, fraud and scams: Carole House of Penumbra Strategies, Ari Redbord of TRM Labs, and Matt Van Buskirk of Hummingbird.
I find financial crime the most frustrating issue in financial regulation. For banks, fighting money laundering takes up more than half their compliance budgets — they spend many billions of dollars on it, every year. And yet, it seems like the more we spend on it, the worse it gets. It’s not getting worse because we’re spending more; it’s getting massively worse in spite of it. Why? Because we’re spending all that money on the wrong things — on old, outdated methods instead of new technologies that could actually get the job done. Meanwhile, the criminals are not making that mistake. They are using the world’s most sophisticated technology to run circles around their opponents, whether to launder illicit funds, perpetrate fraud, steal crypto, or scam unfortunate people out of their life savings. The tech mismatch is stunning. It’s not surprising that financial crimes of all sorts are rising exponentially.
The “of all sorts” is important. Our focus needs to be on all of them — money laundering, terrorist financing, fraud, scams and cyberthreats. One of the problems in the system is that we have traditionally tackled these as separate challenges, happening in separate business and legal frameworks, worked on by different people with different mandates, skill sets, and constraints, in both the industry and the government. That’s a mistake. These crimes all have roughly the same causes, use the same methods, and therefore, need the same solutions. And that is true for both defi and traditional finance.
At the risk of oversimplifying, the financial industry generally views these problems — especially anit-money laundering — as an onerous compliance problem in which the key thing is to follow the rules. That’s wrong. The growth of these crimes is a threat to our way of life. If financial crime was a country, it would be in the G-20.
In the U.S., the Trump administration is conducting a cost-benefit analysis of BSA/AML. I’m going to predict what they’re going to find: very high costs, and very low benefits.
That dismal outcome might tempt people to give up, stop trying, but that response would be a historic mistake that would leave devastating carnage in its wake. The solution is not to give up and let the bad guys take over the world. It’s to arm the good guys with the same technology that’s used by the criminals and terrorists, or better, and give the forces of good an actual chance to fight. What we need to do is seize this moment to massively shift our approach. The same technologies that are fueling rising crime are getting harnessed by the people fighting it. Once we arm the good guys with the same data and tech the bad guys have, everything will change for the better.
It’s completely doable. When your task is to “follow the money,” you need smart technology and robust data that can find transaction patterns hidden in complex systems. Luckily for us, we are living at the dawn of the most transformative time in human history to do that very task. The arrival of generative AI, combined with other tech innovation, enables us to pinpoint information we could never have dreamed of finding in the past. We can now do it.
And the great news is that if we do it, everyone (except the criminals) will win. It’s possible to massively improve outcomes, and reduce costs, at the same time. That’s a rare thing in the regulatory world — win/wins that do both.
Today’s conversation starts with my three guests painting the breathtaking scope and scale of the problem. I won’t repeat it all here, but consider this: Financial crime is now bigger than the illegal drug trade. It earns trillions of dollars a year, mostly through international criminal networks with direct and indirect ties to nations that are adversaries of the United States and free democracies. DARPA says more than half the North Korean nuclear missile program is funded through scams against consumers in the west. The innocent lives ruined by these predatory crimes are beyond our imagination. And will only get worse, unless we change what we do.
From there, today’s guests talk about how to turn this around.
In Part 2, we’re going to home in on the actual solutions. What needs to be done, how, by whom, what will it cost, and what obstacles stand in the way. We’ll find out if my guests are as optimistic as I am about the ability to solve the problem.
When I say we can beat financial crime, I’m of course not saying we’ll stamp out all crime. You can’t do that in a free society. But we don’t need to stamp it all out. We need to turn the rising tide. And we can do that, just by making it hard instead of easy. Doing that will make it far less lucrative. Today these crimes are incredibly profitable, partly because they are nearly risk free. The U.N. says we catch less than one percent. Others say it’s actually a fraction of that. What if we fixed that, so that people trying these crimes knew they might get blocked, and even caught. The “business model” would change profoundly.
If you’re listening to this show and you work in this field, or if you work at a financial company or government agency that have teams who are fighting financial crime, please share this episode. There are so many people toiling away on this problem, in both industry and government, who yearn to have more impact, to really protect people.
Maybe some of you want to listen to it together, say, at a team meeting, and talk about steps that your organization can take. Let’s galvanize our collective energy around making change happen.
In our discussion today, you will hear some talk about the possibility that, for Part 2, we might try to actually get together in person, possibly even over a glass of beer. If we do that, perhaps it will spark some creative thinking. Watch for it!
Carole House
Carole is the CEO of Penumbra Strategies, Distinguished Senior Fellow at ACAMS, and Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council. She recently served as the White House National Security Council’s Special Advisor for Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure Policy. She was the chair of the Technology Advisory Committee for the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has served on advisory councils to New York and Idaho state regulators, and is an Advisory Board Member for the U.S.-China Digital World Order Initiative of Third Way. Carole has a Masters degree from Georgetown University and is a former U.S. Army captain.
Ari Redbord
Ari is the Global Head of Policy at the blockchain intelligence company TRM Labs. He is also Vice-Chair of the CFTC Technology Advisory Committee (TAC).
Prior to joining TRM, Ari was the Senior Advisor to the Deputy Secretary and the Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence at the United States Treasury. In that position, he worked with teams from the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), and other Treasury units to use sanctions and other regulatory tools to safeguard the financial system from illicit use by terrorist financiers, weapons of mass destruction proliferators, drug kingpins, and other rogue actors, including Iran, Syria, North Korea and Venezuela. In addition, Ari worked closely with regulators, Capitol Hill and interagency activities on issues related to the Bank Secrecy Act, cryptocurrency, and anti-money laundering strategies.
Prior to Treasury, Ari was an Assistant United States Attorney for the District of Columbia for eleven years, where he investigated and prosecuted terrorism, espionage, threat finance, cryptocurrency, export control, child exploitation and human trafficking cases.
Matt Van Buskirk
Matt is cofounder and co-CEO, Regulatory, for Hummingbird, a regtech company combatting financial crime. Matt is a regulatory futurist and an advocate for the development of open-source and interoperable software solutions for the regulatory space. He is a frequent speaker on regulatory modernization in venues around the world.
Prior to launching Hummingbird, Matt was the director of compliance at Circle.com where he oversaw its regulatory compliance program from pre-launch to its international expansion. Circle is a blockchain technology company and issuers of the stablecoin USDC. It is focused on transforming the world economy with secure, simple, and less costly technology for storing and using money. In his role there, Matt developed a set of methodologies for building effective compliance and risk programs in cryptocurrency fintechs that has informed much of his later work.
Matt has also served as a bank regulator with the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Thrift Supervision and worked with the regulatory consulting firm Treliant Risk Advisors.
His speaking credentials include numerous government agency and financial industry events, including the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Fintech Festival, Money 2020 in the U.S. and Europe, Finovate Europe, the ABA Regulatory Compliance and Financial Crimes Conferences, and at government agencies such as the World Bank, the U.S. Treasury Department, the Japanese, Irish and Dutch Central Banks, the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Federal Reserve. He has also appeared on the Nasdaq Tech Talks TV segment.
In upcoming episodes, Jo Ann will speak with Patrick Murck, CEO & Co‑Founder of Surus and Saket Narayan from Amazon Web Service. Stay tuned!
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