Finance, Accounting and Audit
Financial Risk and Compliance
Certificate in Anti-Money Laundering (AML) for Compliance Officers
The compliance officer's own exposure: deciding, recording and defending a financial crime judgement somebody will later examine.
- Duration
- 5 days
- Contact hours
- 30
- Level
- Intermediate
- Fee from
- US$1,500
Overview
Anti money laundering controls fail in two directions and both are expensive. A programme tuned too wide produces an alert volume nobody can clear, so the typologies that matter sit in a backlog behind noise. A programme tuned too narrow misses them outright. This week is about the judgement in between, and about the position the money laundering reporting officer personally occupies: named to the regulator, accountable for the decision, and usually the only person who understands why it was made. Delegates work on their own institution's risk assessment, alerts and reporting throughout, so what they leave with is theirs rather than a case study.
Who should attend
Money laundering reporting officers and their deputies, compliance officers in banks, insurers, microfinance and virtual asset businesses, and the internal auditors who have to form a view on whether a financial crime programme works.
What you will be able to do
- Build a customer and product risk assessment that drives different treatment rather than recording the same rating for everybody.
- Design monitoring that detects a typology instead of generating volume, and justify where the thresholds sit.
- Take an alert to a documented conclusion that holds up when somebody reads it two years later.
- Decide what to escalate and what to report, and keep the two separate.
- Write the programme down so it does not depend on the person who designed it.
How it is taught
Short input, then work, across 5 days of roughly 6 teaching hours each. Exercises run on situations delegates bring rather than on a case study written for a different organisation. Cohorts are capped so that everybody is asked something.
Available as classroom, live online, in house.
Programme outline
Day 1
What the obligation actually is
- The reporting officer as a named, personally accountable role
- Where the duty sits in law and where it sits in practice
- Reading a supervisor's findings for what they are really saying
- The difference between a programme that exists and one that works
Day 2
Risk assessment that changes behaviour
- Customer, product, channel and geography, weighted and defended
- Why a rating nobody acts on is worse than no rating
- Beneficial ownership when the answer is not available
- Reviewing an assessment after the business has changed
Day 3
Monitoring and the alert problem
- Typologies the institution is actually exposed to
- Setting and justifying a threshold, and recording why
- Tuning against outcomes rather than against volume
- What a backlog does to the quality of every decision in it
Day 4
Investigation, escalation and reporting
- Taking an alert to a conclusion and writing it so it reads
- Suspicion, knowledge, and the point at which reporting is required
- Handling the customer relationship during an investigation
- Tipping off, and what cannot be said to whom
Day 5
Making it survive you
- Documenting a standard somebody else can be held to
- Training the first line so the second line is not doing their work
- Preparing for an independent review before one is announced
- Handover, continuity and what has to be kept
What you leave with
- A risk assessment for the delegate's own institution, with the reasoning behind each rating recorded.
- A written standard for investigating and closing an alert, in a form a reviewer can follow.
- A capability plan that removes the single point of dependency on one officer.
Dates and fees
| Dates | Location | Format | Fee |
|---|---|---|---|
| 23 to 27 November 2026 | Nicosia, Cyprus | Classroom | US$1,500 |
| 30 November 2026 to 4 December 2026 | Nairobi, Kenya | Classroom | US$1,500 |
| 7 to 11 December 2026 | Accra, Ghana | Classroom | US$1,500 |
| 14 to 18 December 2026 | Kampala, Uganda | Classroom | US$1,500 |
Fees are per delegate and cover tuition, all programme materials and the certificate. Travel, accommodation and visas are arranged by the delegate. Registration closes two weeks before a programme starts.
Certificate
A GATI certificate recording what was attended, issued after the programme has run and attendance has been taken. Attending at least 80 per cent of the days earns a certificate of completion; attending less earns a certificate of attendance stating exactly what was attended. Every certificate carries a code that anybody can check against GATI's own record.
It records participation. and GATI does not claim one it does not hold.