The AML Compliance Book: 150 Golden Rules is a different kind of a compliance handbook; it is unique in many ways. The authors – Andre Nõmm and Matis Mäeker – are AML/CFT experts who have led inspections of AML/CFT landmark cases. They argue that the root cause of failures is often the ignorance of organizational theory fundamentals, rather than in the difficulty to follow extensive financial industry standards. The AML Compliance Book presents the authors’ vision of the approach to be taken to combat money laundering and terrorist financing, proposing solutions for consideration alongside those recognized world-wide today. The authors insist that there is no positive outlook in the fight against money laundering and terrorist financing if financial institutions and supervisors will not employ modern IT and RegTech solutions, such as AI, machine learning and computing powers to detect bad actors. The authors are of the opinion that the fight against money laundering should be turned more to the investigative mode.

The AML Compliance Book focuses less on specific rules, but more on expectations written in them. The AML Compliance Book was published because not everything can be written in a traditional rulebook or a supervisory guideline. Sometimes there is more practicality in basics of life than in the AML/CFT technical standards. Most rules that work simply exist in this world; you do not always have to look for them in the book of law. We all work with limited resources, and not everything can be done with ideal and absolute precision; therefore, it is unthinkable to apply the same level of diligence everywhere. The authors expand their view that simplification is both necessary and inevitable in this challenging AML/CFT world, and instead of over mystifying the field, bringing it back to an applicable business rationale, emphasizing the importance of culture and behaviour.

The 150 golden rules provided in the book allow you to return to the founding principles and their context when you become lost among the often extremely technical standards, which are nowadays produced in large quantities in the AML/CFT landscape. Moreover, these golden rules could help you stay away from more significant problems, to safeguard depositors and promote prevention of the abuse of the financial sector for criminal purposes.

The AML Compliance Book is for anyone who cares about preventing money laundering and terrorist financing, or more broadly speaking, those fighting the crime. These include politicians, prosecutors, law enforcement officials, investigators, staff of financial intelligence units, supervisors, bankers and compliance officers, auditors, attorneys, lawyers, other employees working at financial institutions, journalists, students and why not the average citizen from the street. AML/CFT is not a phenomenon that is in any way isolated from the general principles of compliance, risk or crisis management. The golden rules in this book are in large part transferable to any segment of the financial sector, but also to other compliance-based business areas.