Masters of Compliance: Governing Money Laundering Risk through Professionalisation

This paper focuses on the professionals in charge of controlling money laundering in the financial system. It examines how anti-money laundering (AML) officers, both staff within financial institutions and those tasked with regulating and supervising them, shape their roles, define their tasks and delineate the boundaries of their jurisdictions. Following a more adversarial early relationship between the two groups, the dynamic between the official sector and those in charge of compliance in the private sector is more collaborative. The groups have carved out shared spaces where risk technologies, risk categories and risk reporting lines are negotiated and their governance agreed to. Key to these developments is the evolving professionalisation of AML, promoted both through the role of professional associations such as ACAMS and the formalisation of training of the peer reviewers in charge of national mutual valuations.