Industry Insight: MSc Financial Crime and Compliance in Digital Societies
Okay so hello and welcome to the webinar and I’m delighted to have so many of you join us today for our financial crime and compliance in digital society's industry insight session. So today's event isn't just to support our MSc it's also to talk to you about the ICA PG diplomas available to study and also we just want to talk through the qualifications available and also to provide you with a really engaging and informative industry insight session so something that will really appeal to all our prospective students so whether you're just starting to look at your study options perhaps you're completing your ICA PG diploma or you're starting your application to study the MSc in financial crime and compliance at The University of Manchester so we really hope that you'll use Q&A function to provide us with your thoughts on today's event and but also of course to ask our expert panel any questions you might have regarding the topics we cover or about studying with us and for those who are unable to join us today – I know we've had quite a few emails through and if you're unable to join us for the live session and we will be recording today's event, so if you are watching back hello and also please do still send any questions through to us and you can email me at studyonlineManchester.ac.UK and I’ll ensure either I’ll come back to you with those or I can also pass them on to our guest panel today. In terms of a bit of a brief agenda for the event so as I said we'll hand over shortly to our panel to introduce themselves and we'll look at the importance of academia within the industry and pathways to study the MSc via the ICA . I will then go on to our industry insight session which is digital risks and opportunities for financial crime compliance and finally we'll provide an overview of the MSc which includes the course structure units and also providing some information on the practical master classes as well so as I said earlier we really do want to hear from you during today's event, so you can post any questions in the Q&A function and what we can do is we'll go through those at the end of the session. Brilliant okay so let's get started, it's my pleasure to hand over to our Course Director Dr Katie Benson.
Hi good morning everyone or good afternoon good evening wherever you are sorry I’m a little bit croaky today so I’m hoping my voice holds out but apologize if I sound a little bit croaky and it's really lovely to see so many people here today. As Lisa said I’m Katie Benson I’m one of the course directors for the MSc in financial crime and compliance and digital societies so a bit of background on me I’ve had quite a varied career combining academia and practice so I’m currently a lecturer in criminology here at the university of Manchester and my main teaching focus is this master's degree but I’ve taught for a number of years both here at Manchester and at Lancaster university mainly on financial crime and organized crime white collar crime and also research methods and have supervised PhD students in these areas as well. So my research focuses on these areas as well my main research focus is money laundering and in particular I’m interested in the role that professionals such as lawyers and accountants play in enabling money laundering and how that's regulated but I’ve also done research on corporate bribery domestic bribery and different forms of organized crime and I’ve published books on money laundering and anti-money laundering. So that's the main areas of my research interests prior to coming into academia I worked in various roles and within UK law enforcement in intelligence analysis and research roles in a regional intelligence unit in England and also at the Scottish crime and drug enforcement agency and I’ve done some consultancy work with an overseas corruption investigation and other bits and pieces. I’m also as it says an associate fellow at the rusty centre for financial crime and security studies which has allowed me to get involved with some of the policy-focused work that they do down there so that kind of interface that kind of interaction between academia and practice or policy has been a theme throughout my career and which is part of why I wanted to be involved in this in this master's degree as that kind of interface is such an important part of what we're trying to do with it thanks - I’ll hand over to you Jonathan. Thank you I’m just trying
to switch the slide forward but I don't appear here we go there we go just me being useless with the technology which is a great start when you're talking about digital technologies however my background originally before working for the ICA who I’ve been with for 14 years now was in financial services originally actually as a sales and operational professional ended up running branch networks before moving into the compliance role in 2001 and so I’ve got this year 21 years experience in originally compliance roles but then in risk management anti-money laundering i always remember probably anti in by the way Katie otherwise it does sound a bit dodgy and also in more recent years governance when i was working directly with boards and frameworks around decision making with the ICA for the last 14 years I’ve been basically producing all of the courses around regulatory compliance initially writing a lot of them myself now doing a lot of editing as we've grown and we bring more and more professionals globally into the external faculty that we use at the ICA and obviously with Manchester as our quality assurance partner been developing my relationships and working with people at Manchester for the last decade or so as well but obviously this is our first if you like almost sort of joined the program needing the ICA postgraduate qualification to move on to the MSc at Manchester so this is really exciting time for all of us so my background very much was on the practical side and then moving into training stroke qualifications and coming academia from a very different angle to most people but i really just love learning and i really just love discussing new topics emerging trends emerging topics and looking at it very much from the practical point of view so what do we do with it how does that affect us how does that affect you and obviously we live in a time full of constant change and constant challenges so i very much enjoy the role that i have with the ICA and I’m absolutely loving the the program that we now have in conjunction with Manchester with this master's degree this opportunity for ICA graduates to move on and complete the MSc so that's my background and over the next 30 minutes or so obviously Katie and i will hopefully give you some good insight into the programme and then answer any questions that you might have so i think it's back to you Katie yeah thanks an interesting point you made Jonathan about loving learning new things and learning about new developments and things like that and that's one of the great things about working in in in the money launching and anti-money laundering because I’m interested in the money launching as well as the as the anti-stuff is that it is constantly developing and constantly changing it's something that we're never going to get bored of is it you know there's always going to be new new things to learn about so yeah one of the joys of working in this area and that link between academia and industry and the ICA that we have with this program is really important I was asked to come back to Manchester last year to help run this MSc but I’d been here previously and then moved away to another organization and it was an easy decision for me to make there was no doubt in my mind that i wanted to do that partly because well firstly because it's it's such a great department to be based in there are very few if any really criminology departments in this country that have the research expertise in financial crime fraud organizational misconduct non-compliance and digital technologies digital crime cyber security etc in the way that Manchester does it's really cementing its position as a kind of center of excellence in digital security and in financial crime and compliance so it's a really exciting place to be as an academic as a researcher here at Manchester at the moment but also partly the other thing that appeals so much is because of the uni nature of this master's degree because it at its heart is this partnership between us here in the department of criminology and the ICA and like you said the university's had a relationship with the ICA for a number of years primarily through the business school i think but this MSc allows us to bring together the academic expertise and the social science expertise that we have in the department with the expertise of the ICA and yeah just the point that's on the side and the criminology department was ranked number one in the UK for criminology and in one of the kind of the main higher education ranking tables that we have here in the UK in 2022 and that really reflects the quality of the research and the teaching that is done more broadly right across the department so i think what we bring to the table from the department from the academic side of things is the latest research on financial crime compliance and digital security theoretical perspectives that will allow you to and think differently and think to just take a different way of looking about looking at the risks and your organization faces and the compliance work that you do and also excuse me also the the research methods expertise that will train you to use rigorous social science methods to carry out a dissertation on an area that's of particular interest to you and yeah Jonathan you could talk about what the ICA bring brings to the table as well yeah the ICA postgraduate diploma is our opportunity i think is one of our bridges from although the other qualifications we offer our qualifications diploma advanced certificates they are effectively training in the areas of governance risk compliance financial crime prevention and it's when we get to the diploma level that it really sort of moves into that education element around understanding not just the technical side of compliance but i think the point that Katie made about the social sciences is so important as you become more senior particularly as you then move into leadership roles it's so much more about the relationship management and also understanding the psychology of the criminal element that you're trying to deal with as well so yes there's a lot to learn when it comes to the technicalities but there's also a lot to learn about that side of it and as i said that gets more and more important the more senior you become so we've always been focused the ICA on the practical application of the knowledge and maybe that's where as i say in the more junior qualifications we've run we've been teaching people how to do things and why to do them but as we get into the more senior qualifications such as the postgraduate which I’ll cover in a bit more depth a bit later on in this session we do start getting much more into that that social side of it in terms of understanding the behaviours of other stakeholder groups and that includes the legislators the industry the criminals and also their approach to the technologies and the emerging technologies and the changes in technology and the impact that those groups have on it and that all gives you a fantastic foundation for then going ahead and saying so what do we do about it and i use the question so what so often when I’m teaching somebody will come up with a really insightful idea and be quite pleased with themselves and then i will go that's interesting so what and we go into the practical application side of it so this course brings all of that together at the pinnacle of the two sort of streams that you would enter this kind of area in terms of studying although of course you go and do a PhD if you wish where you can choose your own subject matter but this will get you to that level and it's great to have the masters qualification now that is a direct route from the ICA qualifications Where are we next - oh here we go the pathway so this is still me isn't it right okay so in terms of the pathways into the MSc this qualification is exclusive to holders of the ICAs professional postgraduate diplomas and we have two of them so we have two options at the moment that you can specialize in although they're still quite broad specialisms the first is a professional postgraduate diploma in governance risk and compliance so it focuses on those three main areas the interaction between governance risk and compliance and how for example compliance itself is first of all part of that model as an area of risk managing regulatory risk but the whole area of governance and risk is itself regulated so it's quite a complex regulatory environment to understand but again taking key subjects such as leadership communications establishing the appropriate culture understanding the technology the risks it brings the benefits it brings and how to manage the risks whilst obtaining those benefits all of this is done at the leadership level it's a combination of understanding management but focusing on leadership so a case of setting strategies understanding what the options are not necessarily the technica how to detail but deciding what should be done in terms of a strategy for governance risk and compliance and the other stream is financial crime compliance or financial crime prevention in fact which is broader than just compliance and we look at financial crime prevention as a slightly separate issue it includes anti-money laundering bribery and corruption internal fraud various other areas of financial crime in terms again of setting the strategy what is the strategic approach we need to take and how do we then set up frameworks to enable our businesses or our organizations to implement those strategies some of the detail again that can be covered in other qualifications and the day-to-day activities are quite often in a larger firm certainly delegated but at the level for the postgraduate qualification it's understanding what the overall outcome or objectives are of managing governance risk and compliance or managing financial crime prevention to minimize the risks but also to take advantage of all the areas that these things bring in terms of you know demonstrating to stakeholders which includes your customers and of course includes society as a whole the esg agenda sort of really beginning to come front and center of a lot of what we do that your organization is one that can be trusted and somebody did bring up the trust element a few weeks ago in a particular workshop i was in and it struck me how much more important that is becoming one of the topics in fact one of the social sciences topics that we've been discussing a lot in the last few months is the differences between different generations and the fact that i think a lot of what's being driven from the esg agenda now is actually coming from younger generations and they are the ones sort of forcing through or pushing through the changes that organizations are having to make when it comes to esg and organization's impact so two different routes two different qualifications each has a slightly different syllabus there is of course overlap because you have to have governance risk and compliance overseeing your financial crime compliance so the financial crime compliance element is a little more focused usually undertaken by heads of or directors of anti-money laundering or fraud risk or financial crime risk and the grc sometimes it includes those people as well other times it's more focused on heads of risk directors of risks heads of compliance reporting into directors of risks and it's all about to say either making those strategic decisions or bringing the information to the table and the advice to the table for those people at the very top of an organization to make those decisions and the final thing i would say about the actual two programs that you can't really put into the syllabus that's really beneficial is the networking and the fact that obtaining this qualification gives you fellowship of the ICA and every cohort and we keep the cohorts below 30 normally around 25 or so every cohort stays in contact with each other they create their own networking groups they work together on the projects and the assessments that are set during the course and some long-term professional networking frameworks are set up and quite a few of the fellows then continue to work with the ICA providing us with their expertise with writing sometimes even teaching for us so it's a part of becoming part of the i would say the ICA family which might sound a bit twee but those networks and and having people that you can talk to at your level about the topics you manage is actually a real benefit of the course okay okay thanks very much Jonathan yeah really interesting insight into the two different streams that you have there at the ICA so just for this next 10 minutes or so we're going to just focus in on one particular aspect so as is obvious from the title of the master's degree and a key focus of the degree is the digital environment that we all know live and work in so as experienced compliance professionals I’m sure that you are all well aware of the digital transformations of that have impacted or starting to impact on your roles and your organizations so it was really important for us in developing this MSc that we incorporate that into its focus so just for the next 10 minutes so we're going to talk about some of the challenges that the digital landscape and that emerging digital technologies are creating for compliance but also some of the opportunities for compliance and risk management and regulation that new digital technologies and digital systems can provide so if you want to kind of contribute and it you can write in the in the chat in the q a the kind of challenges that the digital landscape has has created for you and perhaps specifically in your roles so Jonathan i know when we were talking about this earlier you were thinking particularly about data use data security risk that kind of thing has been a key issue for the industry these days yeah well for me when somebody mentions the word digital the first thing that sort of comes to mind is the fact that the only reason that we talk of it we talk about what we do as a digital environment or digital risks and opportunities is because we've gone down this route of data being held digitally very little data now is actually held physically and it's very difficult to do anything with data that sound physically so it's the digital enablement that's taken us down this route of changing basically what data is and again going back to the joy of learning when i joined the ICA 10 years ago this kind of thing would never have occurred to me but it occurred to me over the last few years as we've been sort of discussing how technology has developed that data itself has changed from being a a tool where we would use data for whatever decision making we had or to identify trends or whatever it might be to becoming a commodity as well as a tool because of the amount of data and the different types of data we have but the technology for collecting data has grown faster than our ability to know what we can do with it and certainly a heck of a lot faster than the regulatory environment to manage it so it's the changing nature of data and the technology that's driven it that has created this environment we now find ourselves in and i think everybody is playing catch up to the technological developments it's almost like we're playing with the technology seeing what it can do and then trying to work out so what can what do we do with this and a good example is as i don't know if this is completely true but it sounds true and it's a good story is that all of the data that the h an race created from when it began and depending on which textbook you read h an beings have been around for about 250 000 years up until 2016 so that's everything that we wrote down first of all or we copied or we saved or created in some way and then we had the beginning of the computer generation that data that we collected for 250 000 years up to 2016 we doubled it in the next three years so between 2016 and 2019 we created the same amount of data because we now have such a capability for creating data and you can read the data collection details online if you want to but it uses terms like quadzillions and numbers that you just can't grasp and it's that that really i think has driven the opportunities and the risk so when terms like big data are used that's what we mean it and it sounds like a really sort of juvenile term big data but it just means there's so much but what do we do with it and that of course leads to the risks because we might think great how can we use this for the benefit of humankind you know if we're being really positive about it there's a whole group of people out there generally known as criminals who will say how can i use this for my own personal gain and the advantage criminals have over us of course are that they can be early adopters and they don't have to do due diligence they can basically just throw things at the wall and see what sticks and they will they'll use new technologies first of all to carry out traditional crimes in more advanced ways that's why we see so much fishing you know i can I’m old enough to remember getting letters from nigerian princes asking me to fund them through their court case and of course so that's just improving the efficiency of existing crimes to the creation of new crimes such as denial of service attacks and it's those kind of sort of criminal activities that we then have to respond and react to so how do we do that effectively so we can still get the benefits of having all of this wonderful data we can reach people you know there's it's it when people complain about things like social media it's because they thinking about the negatives it's actually bring so much benefit information data knowledge education you know access to medical records there's so many things that that are positives but there is that underlying risk that we do face both from criminal elements and of course there can be sort of a grey area where it may be that it's not criminal activity but we're not looking after our data properly we're not storing it properly we're holding data we shouldn't really be holding when there's no need to so there's this sort of the regulatory issues as well that a lot of pressure groups maybe in governments as well are quite keen to manage and to look after that eventually ends up on our table as compliance and risk professionals how do we manage all of those what I’ve just described really high level issues in terms of how a regulator might say we're going to regulate this can they do it effectively is it even possible we have the general data protection regulations as our sort of new quite wide-ranging data legislation in Europe for the last few years but even by the time it was launched it was already to a degree out of date because the technology and the ideas and creativity of using data is ongoing day by day by day whereas the legislation has to be written approved agreed implemented rolled out it's out of date by the time it's there so how do we deal with those anomalies as well these are the kind of questions that i love discussing but it does get to that point of so how do we manage that in the workplace yeah i agree with everything there Jonathan really interesting points and i we start off that this unit within the masters basically talking about this this idea of the datifIcation of society that you mentioned dimension justice and just this vast increase in data that that is out there the hype connected nature of everything we do and what that means for compliance professionals and we really get students in that first part of the unit to think about what does that mean to them in their roles in their particular in their particular organizations what does that increase amount of data what did it mean to them and what impact has it had on their role and you mentioned the idea if you can have kind of cyber-enabled crime and cyber dependent crime so we have these crimes that that basically have always been there but they've just been fine-tuned and they've just been made quicker or more effective more efficient because of digital technologies kind of allowing that and we talk about those and but we also talk about new crimes that have been that are dependent on the digital society the digital systems crimes have been created and you talked about a whole range of those types of crimes fishing hacking and dos attacks that kind of thing and we talk a lot about that in in the course so part of the part of the unit focuses on on different types of cyber attacks different types of financial financial crimes that can affect students organizations and then we spend time and we have a couple a couple of weeks in the unit talking about cyber security and what people can do within their organizations to better protect better protect their organizations and we on one of our master classes a few weeks ago we had a professor of cyber security from here at Manchester talking about around those things and had had students doing some really interactive stuff around and thinking about how to how to better protect systems the one of the other things oh no i'll come to that one of these things that i was talking about when you i was thinking about when you were speaking was the role of FinTech and the emergence of FinTech sector you talked about how practically we deal with these volumes of data and things like that and in the last i don't know 15 years i think kind of i think 2008 was seen as the start of the FinTech era and we've seen this explosion of new FinTech startups and FinTech organizations and we look at the emergence of the FinTech sector and the potential kind of compliance and financial crime anti-money laundering solutions that those kind of organizations can provide both in terms of regtech for the regulated sector and suptec for the regulators so things like automated transaction monitoring and using ai and machine learning for risk identification and monitoring and for regulators the kind of emerging technological solutions to improve oversight to surveillance and ai and machine learning can be used quickly to identify patterns more quickly and do predictive analysis of markets and identify potential issues in high volumes of regulatory filings so there's this huge array of new solutions out there which are there to support people in compliance roles and support people working in financial services and the different sectors that require this and but there's lots of also i think potential risks from these kind of new technological solutions to compliance and that's something that we try and think about on the course so some of the you'll probably be able to think of more than me Jonathan but some of the ones i can think of are things like cost to start with so the cost for organizations to purchase these kind of products the training that they might need perhaps a recruitment of specialists specialist staff and if you don't recruit specialist staff the lack of expertise within organizations to to properly use effectively use the kind of FinTech solutions that can be purchased from third parties you talked about data security and kind of the more digital solutions i think that are used and the more vulnerabilities are created for data security so you may be introducing cyber vulnerabilities and by using kind of third-party FinTech solutions they also obviously have are going to have limitations all new technologies have limitations and so there may be the risk that they over detect kind of detect spurious rather than meaningful signals so you may still need to maintain that kind of manual oversight and one of the things that we talked about with our students quite a lot in i think it was at the master class as well was this the importance of h an still you know when we have all these digital solutions the importance of the h an the importance of compliance actors still working alongside the technology and then just the practical aspects of innovating novel technologies into existing processing processes and systems which we always have so i think lots of opportunities for technological solutions to support compliance but risks there as well and i guess balancing that is the key yeah and the couple of points you're making there i mean particularly around the use for example of ai coming through as it's a fantastic and wonderful tool if it's programmed properly at the beginning and if somebody keeps an eye on it to make sure it doesn't go off and start doing strange things because as you know it's like normal intelligence we have bad days so can AI systems so it it's changing the role if you like from being the data processor to the data overseer and trying to make sure that the technology we're using is doing what we want from it and that that's certainly something i found very interesting because i was quite I’ve always been quite interested in h an biases and why we behave irrationally and it's really fascinating to see the ai right from the day one does exactly the same thing so technology is a fantastic tool but it is still only as good as the person who develops it codes it writes it is it fit for purpose at the outset and then if it has some form of machine learning or ai in it is it going to continue to be fit for purpose and do the job it needs and i think one of the stresses that puts on people working in compliance or grc type roles is having enough knowledge to ask the right questions we don't have to be coders and understand the coding that's going on but we have to understand what we expect the technology to do and identify perhaps when it's starting to do something unexpected and how to utilize it to achieve our outcome as opposed to one of the dangers with FinTech or regtech is the off-the-shelf solutions or third-party solutions are they actually going to bring achieve the outcomes that individual firms particularly require because we don't all want exactly the same thing from technology we might all have different requirements from our red tech and FinTech solutions so it's great that there is an industry out there providing these products and services but there's that risk of us making sure we get the right use of technology and then being able as you mentioned to use it having the knowledge and understanding enough not to be able to design your own FinTech product but be able to manage and utilize one effectively and not become over-reliant on them as well there is a risk that we say well we know what that's doing so we'll check everything that comes out at the end of that that process if it raises red flags great we'll investigate them and you might investigate the red flags perfectly but is it identifying all of the red flags how do we know that you know if we don't understand how it identifies red flags so still a lot of h an input required it's just perhaps if you like getting a lot of the sort of more manual data processing done for us but we need to obviously still have that risk awareness of what new risks it brings to light and i think one thing you said there was really important and one thing that we kind try and stress is that perhaps not all the detail that we cover in the unit will be directly relevant to everyone but it's about having that that language and that understanding and being able to talk perhaps to the to the it department in your organization the the coders the data the data specialist that kind of thing making sure you have the language around cyber security and digital aspects it allows you to have that those conversations to do your compliance job effectively and it and it's amazing what we don't know about cyber security things we don't know until it's pointed out to us you know before i started looking into it properly and getting involved i was already on Facebook i was already using online systems and all of a sudden you realize how much personal information you've put out there and again there might be a generational piece coming along here younger generations expect to use this technology all the time they already see the benefits of it but that came along before the risks were perhaps identified and we understood how we need to manage and regulate these risks and oversee them so we're constantly playing catch up and people have got used to the freedom of using data used to the freedom of access to data and it's going to be quite hard if we want to try and pull that back and rein that in so how else can we manage the risks what else could we potentially do is it does it become more about education an end user than the technology itself yeah and i don't want to run over time but just quickly something else that we haven't touched on but which is very much part of landscape these days is cryptocurrencies virtual assets even though i don't know maybe cryptocurrencies are reaching there reaching their peak perhaps we'll wait and see but what do you think the implications for compliance professionals are in the rise ofcrypto well it's fascinating obviously what's going on right at the moment and that's another why this whole area is so interesting was it yesterday that oh crikey I’ve forgotten his name now it's amazing how famous names just disappear from your head but they sold all of that to the people owned tesla cars et cetera musk sold all his bitcoin okay yesterday apparently obviously it's a newspaper report and who knows what you can believe when you read in the media especially what type of digital media you're reading but the whole bitcoin thing the issue there potentially is of course it was the first it was the most famous initially and is it actually a true representation of a crypto currency and what it will or will not do is much more of a speculative investment not really a cryptocurrency it ended up being used as a cryptocurrency and that was how it was perhaps presented but its usage is what's led to what's happened so i think going forward we're already seeing governments getting involved as well as large institutions in having much more controlled crypto assets whether their currencies whether there are other types of crypto assets things like initial coin offerings really useful tools really in you know good ways of getting new ideas new businesses up and running so there is a lot of benefits of crypto assets but you know it's a new market it's being volatile that in itself is going to worry certain people and as i say it attracted you know speculative investment so it's probably a cycle we've had to go through and whether we're completely through that initial speculative investment process yet is debatable but we are seeing now more mainstream crypto assets coming along and in fact some people don't realize you know most of us already have a crypto asset because technically if you have a reward scheme with any organization that's a crypto asset but it's a very simple well-controlled one that's not particularly attractive criminals although there has been some criminality around them but things like nectar points or whatever your petrol station rewards you with their crypto assets so they are becoming part of mainstream and i think it's a case of they're here to stay you can't put them back in the box and say we're not going to do anything with that and therefore you know going forward we've got to try and say so how do we avoid the volatility how do we manage the financial crime risk associated here because we're talking about assets that don't exist so you don't have to steal a thing you are stealing data which is a lot easier to steal than physical assets and you know and when i say things are getting away from the volatile area look at what's happening with nfts in the last year so you know the first tweet i think it was somebody bought for half a million wanted to sell for 50 million and the highest bid he got was six hundred thousand six thousand dollars you know it is you know a really strange area to be in at the moment and avoid it like the plague from an investment point of view although it's not investment advice but it's here to stay so it is a payment methodology or so certainly with blockchain as well the distribution models for crypto assets blockchain is a fantastic model if we can get it working properly if everybody understands it and we use it appropriately but we're running out of time so i can't start going on and on about it but again it's fascinating area that we need to understand enough about i think again is the first stage to ask the right questions identify the benefits and identify the risks then we can start thinking about how we manage them and ideally for the benefit of yourself your firm your industry yeah y i agree and it's it's something we look at in the course could never cover everything related to the course but we look at the kind of the rise of cryptocurrencies the way cryptocurrencies are used on the darknet we talk a little bit about that by criminals how that kind of started off silk road and things like that and we talk about distributed ledger technology and blockchains and the potential power of blockchain and for investigations and pretend prevention and things like that and we also talk a little bit about regulating virtual asset service providers and thinking about what you said about gdpr legislation before and how about how that moves on how that doesn't move on quickly you know it doesn't move on quickly if we move on quicker than that the legislation catch up and the kind of the complications of having regulations in place to regulate virtuosic service providers and things like that so it's a it's a huge area in itself and we try and touch as much on that as possible in the course so i think perhaps if we finish that section there Lisa and then i'll just move on to talk a little bit about just give the attendees a brief overview of the of the MSc yeah that would be brilliant yeah that was a really interesting session thank you i can i don't think the only problem you have when you're talking about this stuff is trying to get enough in what to leave out and when to shut up i know exactly you could talk about it all day couldn't you still not untouched onall of it okay so i'll now just give you a bit more detail about the co the content and structure of the course excuse me hopefully if my if my voice holds out and so as we've mentioned the course is for experienced professionals working in various roles in compliance governance and regulation who have completed a postgraduate diploma with the ICA so this puts you in a really kind of exclusive group of professionals in in your sector who have this this kind of combined qualification so the ICA diploma will give you 60 credits towards the 180 that you need for a master's degree so this this course will give you those further 120 credits over 12 months and giving you a master's degree in MSc in combination with your pgdip from the ICA so the course is designed to provide you with knowledge and understanding of various financial crime and compliance risks or to enhance your understanding of the kind of risks that you'll already be familiar with throughout through your role to introduce you to academic research on financial crime and compliance and to concepts and theories from academic research that you can apply to your own experience and to give you different ways of thinking about the challenges that you face in your organization or in your role to give you the opportunity to learn from your peers and from experts in the field and as well as from the learning materials that that we provide so you'll engage in discussion tasks with your peers and come together three times during the year in the weekend master classes I’ll talk about in a minute and to enhance your understanding of the issues that we've been talking about today the risks and opportunities for compliance and regulation created by both the evolving digital landscape and finally it's also been designed to give you the skills and the opportunity to carry out an original piece an original research project on a subject of your choice through the dissertation the final dissertation which I’ll talk more about as well could you move the next slide please Lisa i don't seem to be leave it thank you so there are four units on the course excuse me sorry there are four units on the course to make up that 120 credits to add to the 60 you would already have from your diploma units 1 2 and 3 are 20 credit modules which each take place over a 10 week period and then unit 4 is a dissertation project which is 60 credits and so makes up the remaining third of the program in unit 1 which is about analysis and explanation of compliance and financial crime risk we look at some of the key concepts around financial crime and compliance and explain the benefits of using and social science theory to help us understand financial crime risks in more depth and to understand the broader context of compliance work so we introduce you to some key criminological theories on financial crime and non-compliance and methods for analyzing different forms of non-compliance so the assessment for this unit allows you to take these concepts theories and modes of analysis and apply them to a particular case of your choice so it allows you to see how these more kind of abstract ideas can help you to understand issues of relevance to your workplace in unit 2 and as I’ve spoken about we focus on digital technologies and financial crime and compliance so in this unit we begin by looking at the hype connected data intensive context that you operate in and what this means for your organization and your role we look at the various potential cyber threats to your business and how you can keep your digital systems secure we look at cryptocurrencies and at regtech and subtech and again throughout all this tasks and discussion boards that you'll engage that you'll engage in are designed to make you think about how all these things apply directly to your to your role in your workplace unit 3 begins to get you ready for carrying out your dissertation and so we look at some of the different methods of carrying out compliance research and some of the challenges with doing this kind of research and we'll take you through the process of identifying research questions selecting appropriate research methods and designing financial crime research and we'll also talk about some of the some of the compliance data and corruption statistics and things like that that are already out there and how you can interpret those and think critically about those so there's some overlap between unit 3 and unit 4 as we provide those fundamentals of foundations of doing research within unit 3. and then unit 4 is the dissertation project and there are three pathways for you to choose from here so you can either do an individual research project with which is a kind of classic traditional dissertation which will be a 12 to 15 000 word dissertation involving some empirical research if you didn't want to do quite so much kind of empirical research and there's such a big dissertation you can do a short dissertation which is six to eight thousand words but and then alongside that to kind of make up the the credit and you would do three research focused kind of mini units and to give you a bit more kind of research training and then you also have the option of doing a group dissertation so if you have common interests with other students on the course and you can choose to work as a group of three to five and to produce a group dissertationso for units one to three and the majority of the materials are online for you to work through at your own pace and so this is to allow you to kind of fit it around your own work schedules so this includes textual materials videos and various tasks for you to complete to consolidate and check your learning and reading lists and discussion boards for you just to discuss ideas and issues with your peers so we've tried to design it to make it as flexible as possible for you to fit it around your work and around different time zones things like that you also have the opportunity to meet with you with your cost tutors every week for individual one-on-one discussions and you'll have three weekend masterclasses held at the university around halfway through and each of the three units so these master classes run from Friday lunchtime to Sunday lunch time and involve sessions from also myself my colleague professor nick lord but also more interestingly from external speakers so that's either colleagues and from the ICA such as Jonathan or we have had this year an expert in cyber security and behavioural scientists who advise on decision making and compliance processes for financial services and ahead of risk and compliance at a global bank and so we have external speakers coming in as well and these weekends really allow you to develop your networks with the speakers and but also with your peers and help to build that really strong kind of network that you can make with your peers on the course and they'll consolidate the learning that you've done online during the weeks okay and then just a final slide Lisa this just gives a summary of how the timetable works basically so we run from the first week of September units one two and three are ten weeks as i said weeks one to four and six to nine have this on these online materials for you to work through at your own pace and in weeks five and ten there are no new materials these weeks are there for you to catch up and consolidate what you've done and you'll learn consolidate your learning and work on your assessments and then you have an and then we have a 20 week dissertation project Thanks Lisa and i'll hand over to you to finish off I’m going to interrupt Lisa just one second i forgot to mention when i was talking about the postgrad that we have got entry for the two postgrads coming up as well i think the financial crime begins on the 1st of august so you'd have to be quick for that one but we can get the application through quick enough and the governance risk and compliance begins on the 28th of august so there's a little bit more time there and there were those links on the screen earlier but if you google the international compliance association you'll find us thanks john i was going to as well i think the email address we have is that is ICA info at int hyphen comp.org so please again you know you can either email the ICA or and please email me at the email address on the slide study online at Manchester.ac.UK and i'll
be able to appoint you in the right direction so that was so informative thank you very much and as you can see just on on the current slide our next course start date is this September so i said the session today has attracted students from you know whether you're new to the student journey considering that studying with the ICA or with the with the MSc or perhaps you've already you know you've received an offer to study with those if you have congratulations and however you know to confirm your offer please do make sure you've accepted that and that's that we can guarantee your place on the course we still have a limited number of places available so i said if you are considering to study with us but maybe you have some questions that you want to go through or you're looking at your application and you're unsure of what information we require from you and just let me know and i'll be able to support you with that and i know we had a couple of questions come through I’ve managed hopefully to answer some of those direct but if you have got any please just keep popping them on the track now in regards to sessions that it is recorded today so what we can do is make sure that that's sent round i said to anybody who's unable to attend but also for those of you that have managed to join us today you'll also be sent a copy so i said you know you can watch that back at your convenience and just let us know if there's anything you're unsure of and as i said we are now accepting applications so please do i said submit now just to ensure you secure your place i know we did have a question in regards to intakes and just that we had two intakes in September however moving forward we are going to one in take p.s so in 2023 we'll be going to September 2023 intakes we won't have one in February so and i said if you are quite keen to get started with your studies i recommend submitting an application this year and rather than waiting until 2023 and but i don't think we've had any more questions come through yet which is that is good because i think we've always had such a great session today we're already running up to the hour which is brilliant Katie Jonathan anything else you'd like to add at all sign up for either the postgrad or for the MSc because it's great fun as well as all the other stuff it's fun it's fun yeah and as Jonathan said you know for those of you who haven't yet got the got the diploma then yeah there's the date starting for those so as well in august so lots of opportunities coming up for whatever situation you're at whatever stage you are at and thinking about it the two postgrad courses that begin in august they will be completed in time to join the September 23 intake because the postgrad course although it says i think 10 to 12 months it's normally within 10 months and if anybody is particularly keen to join the postgrad we can always sort of facilitate the final assessment to make sure it's done in time brilliant thank you Jonathan i said we think moving to one in tip here as well that is actually in line with all of the courses that it was just the launch that we had the two intakes so it's not there's no reason behind us cutting back to one in tape yeah which is purely just to fall in line with it with many of our other online and blended courses fantastic session j thank you very much guys as i said if anybody's watching now and has any questions just send them through and i said if you are considering study with us please do get your applications sooner rather than leaving it to the last moment but thank you so much Katie and Jonathan it's been really good today thank you Lisa see you guys everybody
2022-07-29 07:16
