On 24 April, St. Petersburg hosted the section “Conscious Compliance: Path to a High Culture of Client Communication. Work with Young People as an Element of Proactive Compliance and Increasing Financial Inclusion” on the sidelines of the International Forum for Supervisory Authorities and Private Sector.
The discussion focused on how to move from formal control and blanket checks to fostering a culture of compliance, building trust-based relations with clients, and strategically engaging the young people.
Mikhail Pronin, Vice President of PSB Bank PJSC, moderated the panel that included Ivan Uvarov, Director General of ITMCFM; Irina Kononenko, Head of the Compliance Control Department at Alfa-Bank JSC; and foreign colleagues — Huawei Zhang, a representative of the New Development Bank, and Sammy Chilunga, a specialist from the African Export-Import Bank.
The speakers discussed the challenges compliance teams face in training their people, building corporate cultures, and sustaining institutional development.
In his remarks, the Director General of ITMCFM highlighted the Centre’s role as a liaison between supervisors, the private sector and education providers. Ivan Uvarov noted that, in that capacity, ITMCFM
- provides training and collects feedback from supervisory and law enforcement practitioners;
- through its network of partner organizations, communicates legal requirements and best practices to compliance specialists;
- as a member of the International Association of Training and Methodology Centers, is building a systemic “train the trainer” mechanism;
- coordinates universities of the International Network AML/CFT Institute (INI) on real-world-ready specialized educational programs.
Mr. Uvarov also emphasized the importance of working with young people. The Centre is coordinating the INI effort to build a training pipeline for future supervision, financial intelligence and compliance professionals, based on the latest international standards and real, rather than imagined, needs of AML/CFT systems.
“This is critically important for the future of compliance: specialists enter the profession already having experience of working on real tasks, understanding the international context and possessing interdisciplinary cooperation skills. The International Association of Training and Methodology Centers will later join this work. A unified competency framework and expert certification system will show exactly what future AML/CFT specialists need to be taught so that their knowledge and skills meet the expectations of national AML systems,” Ivan Uvarov noted.
