Financial crime compliance

Our national financial crime compliance team has market-leading experience in advising all aspects of financial crime compliance, including money laundering, sanctions, fraud, bribery and corruption.

We are proactive in identifying emerging issues and developing strategies to combat risk before it impacts on your business. Using our position as trusted legal advisers, we work closely with our clients, the regulators and industry bodies to provide thought leadership on issues affecting you. This includes organising and actively participating in industry discussions and information-sharing sessions to support the sector in combating fraud.

We regularly come up against the UK’s main regulators and enforcement agencies such as the SFO, the FCA, HMRC and the police. Members of our team include former compliance officers, prosecutors and individuals who have worked on some of the largest financial crime cases over the last 20 years.

We are therefore uniquely placed to be able to advise not just what the law says, but how to implement effective and efficient economic crime controls that work in practice.

We can assist you with:

• Financial crime compliance programmes: we can help you design and implement new financial crime compliance programmes and stress test and perform effectiveness and efficiency reviews of existing programmes.
• Training and awareness: our training programs are designed to educate your staff on compliance requirements and best practices to mitigate financial crime risks.
• Crisis management: in the event of a financial crime incident, our team is ready to provide immediate assistance and guide you through the resolution process.

Our team has:

• Advised clients on how to develop and implement external fraud controls to defend a charge of failure to prevent fraud under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023. Find out more here.
• Advised clients on their internal unusual activity reporting and external suspicious activity reporting of money laundering and terrorist financing concerns.
• Advised a challenger bank on the adequacy of the process taken to provide the SMF1 attestation to the FCA regarding account closures based on political views.