3 Questions for Sepideh Rowland, who leads our BSA/AML/Financial Crime practice
What drew you to a life of financial crime compliance?
The investigative challenge. My first major case was a complex fraud that only surfaced once the loan had gone into default. I had to reconstruct an entire scheme — tracing assets, identifying overlooked red flags, and piecing together a puzzle no one had realized existed. I was hooked.
What's the biggest change banks and other companies need to focus on?
Recognizing that information sharing is fundamental infrastructure, not an optional add-on. The USA PATRIOT Act created formal pathways — Section 314(a) for law enforcement–financial institution sharing, and 314(b) for peer-to-peer intelligence. Those mechanisms were designed to break down silos.
But 25 years later, most institutions still treat information sharing as a compliance task rather than a competitive advantage. Banks that are winning are building real ecosystems — where intelligence flows in real time, where a fraud pattern detected at one institution triggers alerts across the network, where you're not waiting for a regulatory referral to act.
For bank CEOs: top three priorities for the rest of 2026?
1. Deploy AI-driven early warning systems at scale. Not rule-based monitoring — invest in machine learning models that detect novel typologies in real time, reduce false positives by 30-40%, and free compliance teams to focus on exception handling rather than noise. The institutions that crack this will see measurable gains in both risk detection and operational efficiency.
2. Build a unified threat intelligence function. Stop siloing fraud, AML, cyber, and operational risk. Create a single lens that shows you where criminals are actually targeting your institution. That integration alone will uncover vulnerabilities your existing teams miss — and it's a multiplier for your collaboration efforts.
3. Make information sharing a core business practice. Don't wait for regulatory requests. Build standing relationships with peer institutions and law enforcement, with intelligence flowing weekly, if not daily. Banks doing this today are detecting threats 3-6 months before they'd surface through normal channels.
These three don't exist in isolation; they amplify each other. Technology enables faster intelligence, unified threat intelligence sharpens what you're sharing, and real collaboration multiplies the impact of everything else you're doing.
