Resources

The Investigative Edge

A weekly briefing for financial crime, compliance, and investigation professionals that want sharper context without the noise.

What's inside

Five sections.
One sharp read.

Each issue follows the same battle-tested structure — so you always know where to look for what matters.

Lead

The Lead Story

A close read of one investigation, scheme, or enforcement action that matters right now.

Signals

Risk Radar

Emerging fraud typologies, threat actors, and red-flag patterns you should be watching.

Compliance

Regulatory Pulse

What regulators just did — and what it means for your compliance program next quarter.

Tradecraft

Practical techniques, prompts, and workflows from working investigators and analysts.

Research

The Reading Room

Curated reports, court filings, and research worth your time — with the key takeaways pulled out.

Updates

Edge Notes

Quick hits, tool launches, and signal-not-noise updates from across the risk ecosystem.

Weekly briefing

Sharper reads for the work behind the alert.

Each edition brings together the practical themes shaping fraud, compliance, and investigative work this week — with the context to help teams respond with confidence.

Briefing

The MSB Compliance Paradox

Money services businesses operate under a compliance paradox: the regulatory profile of their business model demands investigation intensity that their margin structure cannot support. This issue maps the economics of that problem — and examines what the American Express $350M AML consent order, announced last week, reveals about where the same logic breaks down for larger institutions.

Published October 2026Read the issue

Briefing

Surveillance Under Scrutiny: What FINRA’s 2026 Oversight Report Means for Broker-Dealer Compliance Programs

FINRA’s 2026 Annual Regulatory Oversight Report landed in December with an unusually specific set of expectations for broker-dealers deploying AI in supervisory and compliance workflows. Examiners are already asking firms about agentic AI governance before formal guidance arrives. This issue maps what the report actually requires, where most surveillance programs fall short, and what a defensible compliance posture looks like under FINRA Rule 3110.

Published October 2026Read the issue

Briefing

Insight vs. Noise: What the ACAMS Assembly Got Right

The ACAMS Assembly returned to Las Vegas September 29–October 1, 2026, with a deceptively simple theme: Insight vs. Noise. Across 65+ sessions and 140 speakers, the conference surfaced some hard-won clarity about what AI actually changes in financial crime compliance — and what it doesn’t. Here’s what mattered.

Published October 2026Read the issue

Briefing

The Onboarding Bottleneck: AI, Fixed Income, and the Compliance Cost of Slow

Institutional client onboarding has become one of the most consequential compliance bottlenecks in wholesale banking and fixed income. In partnership with Armstrong Wolfe, we’re launching a community dedicated to solving it — and this issue lays out why the problem is bigger than most institutions realize, and where AI fits in.

Published September 2026Read the issue

Briefing

The Seven-Signal Scorecard: Reading the September Decision

Correspondent banking relationships have declined 30% since 2011 as institutions exited high-risk corridors to reduce financial crime exposure — a strategy that FATF's 2025 updated guidance has called out directly for pushing payment flows into informal channels and making the underlying risk worse. Issue No. 18 examines the compliance economics driving de-risking, why managing risk rather than avoiding it is now the regulatory expectation, and how agent-assisted due diligence changes the cost calculus that made exiting a relationship cheaper than investigating it.

Published September 2026Read the issue

Briefing

The Payments Compliance Stack

Published September 2026Read the issue

Briefing

What Fourteen Issues Taught Us: The State of Agentic AI in Financial Crime — and Where the Industry Is Heading

Fourteen issues of research across five investigative workflows, three governance chapters, and the DOJ's new self-disclosure framework have confirmed the series' central argument: the bottleneck in financial crime compliance isn't detection — it's the investigation workflow. Issue No. 15 takes stock of what held up, what surprised us, and what the industry's shift from experimentation to governed deployment means for the 26 issues ahead.

Published September 2026Read the issue

Briefing

When AML Meets Internal Investigations: The Compliance Workflow That Now Determines Criminal Liability

DOJ's new Corporate Enforcement Policy and SDNY's voluntary self-disclosure program offer a declination — no fines, no monitor — if your institution finds misconduct and reports it before the government does. The compliance investigation workflow is now a criminal liability question, and Issue No. 14 maps the eight-step corporate investigation workflow that makes self-disclosure possible.

Published August 2026Read the issue

Briefing

Where Does Your Data Actually Go? The AI Vendor Assessment Questions Every Compliance Team Should Be Asking

Before you sign an AI contract, your vendor needs to answer 12 specific questions about data handling, security, and governance. Issue No. 13 provides the assessment toolkit — plus FinCEN's new $5 billion human smuggling analysis and the five contract clauses that convert vendor commitments into enforceable obligations.

Published August 2026Read the issue