Financial Threats

Illicit actors – from terrorists to organized crime syndicates to corrupt foreign officials – take advantage of the global financial infrastructure to finance their unlawful activities and hide their ill-gotten gains.

The U.S. Intelligence Community has insight into these actors’ identities, networks, and activities, but it has little ability to monitor actual financial transactions; private sector companies, particularly financial services firms, know how funds move around but often find it challenging to assess the identities or motivations of those involved in financial transactions. Effectively combating illicit financial activities thus requires greater collaboration between the public and private sectors.

Chair & Vice Chair

Leslie Ireland

Financial Threats Council Chair

Board Member, Citigroup

Kelly Brickley

Financial Threats Council Vice Chair

Senior Director, Cyber Risk, Capital One

INSA’s Financial Threats Council works to strengthen public-private cooperation and information sharing regarding the broad range of threats faced by government, the financial services sector, and other industries, which include cyber security, money laundering, terrorist finance, transnational organized crime, corruption, and confidence in U.S. and global financial infrastructure.

The Council seeks to:

Identify key problems and challenges associated with financial threats to our national security.
Shape public policy regarding financial threats that affect American businesses’ interests and activities.
Develop specific new policy, legislation, intelligence, and law enforcement options to expose and counter these threats and the activities of the enablers who facilitate illicit financial activity.
Promote close collaboration between the private sector and the U.S. Government on efforts to identify financial vulnerabilities and establish tools and processes to counter efforts to exploit said vulnerabilities.

Publications

Improving Information Sharing on Suspected Financial Fraud

The USA PATRIOT Act permits financial institutions to share information with each other and the government only in instances of suspected terrorism and money laundering. This constrains banks' ability to combat other types of financial crime. INSA recommends steps to strengthen information sharing u ...

FINnet: Classified Information Sharing for the Financial Sector

INSA encourages the US Government to partner with financial institutions to establish a unique, public-private CS/IA program. Such a program should include a portal modeled on DIBnet to enable the real-time, secure flow of classified and unclassified cyber threat data between federal and non-federal ...