What makes an AML Expert?

It must have been sometime around 2010 when I received a phone call from a recruitment agency telling me they urgently needed an AML SME, remembers Mario Menz.. Nowadays most of us know SME - at least when those three letters are placed after AML - means "subject matter expert". But back in 2010, working in a corporate banking environment, SME to me meant small and medium-sized enterprise. Why, I thought at the time, would anyone urgently need a small or medium-sized enterprise for AML purposes?

Mario Menz (mario.menz@hotmail.co.uk) is Head of Compliance & MLRO for Ghana International Bank plc, and course director of the LL.M Financial Services Law, Regulation & Compliance at London Metropolitan University.

It must have been sometime around 2010 when I received a phone call from a recruitment agency telling me they urgently needed an AML SME, remembers Mario Menz.. Nowadays most of us know SME - at least when those three letters are placed after AML - means "subject matter expert". But back in 2010, working in a corporate banking environment, SME to me meant small and medium-sized enterprise. Why, I thought at the time, would anyone urgently need a small or medium-sized enterprise for AML purposes?