Samar Pratt
Global Financial Crime Compliance Advisory Leader at Capgemini
Hi Samar, tell us about your role as Global Financial Crime Compliance Advisory Leader at Capgemini. How has your career taken you to where you are now?
I started my career in various administrative and clerical roles before going to university. Working those two years before starting university really opened my eyes to the real world and motivated me to work hard throughout my degree course.
After completing my studies, I spent five years in two public accounting firms, landing governance, risk and compliance (GRC) roles first at EY in London and then at Deloitte in London and Sydney. Following those experiences, I moved to Barclays Investment Bank, and then to Barclays Group HQ, to take on various internal audit, risk and compliance leadership roles. I soaked up knowledge like a sponge about different parts of the bank and different types of products and services.
After the financial crisis hit, I needed a change and wanted to do something completely different so seized the opportunity to join a GRC start-up, Exiger. Here, I honed my financial crime regulatory expertise, working with regulators around the world and some of the best innovators in the industry.
I learned so much during this time from brilliant colleagues and clients across the banking and fintech sectors. Exiger grew from its origins as a court-appointed monitor, to become a successful SaaS technology and financial crime consulting company. Then, in October 2023, the financial crime consulting practice that I led globally was acquired by Capgemini.
Today, I’m excited to begin this new chapter as part of the Capgemini family, to combine the financial crime regulatory knowledge across my team with the business and tech transformation capabilities at Capgemini to disrupt financial crime compliance, with advisory-led innovation as well as tech-enabled advisory solutions and managed services.
Is where you are now anything like you envisaged your job to be growing up? What was your dream job as a child?
As a child, I really enjoyed travelling to far-flung places with my family and so I wanted a job that would allow me to travel. My dream jobs when I was younger had travel as a consistent theme: a British Airways flight attendant and a globe-trotting interior designer – both quite different from what I do!
Today, I help clients all over the world manage risk, fight financial crime and meet their compliance regulatory obligations efficiently and effectively, using disruptive technology and blend-shore managed services. So, while I didn’t become a flight attendant, I’m grateful that in all my roles, I’ve managed to satisfy my travel bug.
What’s the best thing about your role today, what inspires you in your work? Conversely, what are the biggest challenges you have to overcome in your role?
What inspires me at work is that the solutions my team provides really help our clients manage risk and stop the bad guys from enjoying their ill-gotten gains. Criminals and fraudsters who commit financial crimes thrive in dark corners. It’s here that my team gives clients the tools and techniques to shine a light on potential bad actors and stem the flow of dirty money through our financial system.
Fraud and financial crime are on the rise in financial services. How important is having the right FCC frameworks in place for FinServs today?
It is vital. If a regulated financial institution wants to maintain its license to do business, it must be able to demonstrate to regulators that it has an effective FCC framework that is proportionate to its scale and complexity. Crucially, this framework must be commensurate with the firm’s risk profile spanning its customers, products & services, transactions, geographical presence, and delivery channels.
How is tech leading the charge to deliver new solutions that help fight financial crime? What tech solutions do you employ at Capgemini?
Financial crime thrives when banks don’t know who their customers are or when they fail to detect changes in their customers' risk profiles. The technology today has come so far that firms can now automate the highly manual parts of their financial crime process that are prone to human error and move towards more of a perpetual know-your-customer (pKYC) model.
Through our FCC Alliance Partners, Capgemini is building a sandbox environment where our clients can test out new ways to leverage structured/unstructured data and best-in-class software to develop their own pKYC model.
Capgemini works with leading data and software vendors to provide our clients with best-in-class customer onboarding, case management, screening and transaction monitoring technology that not only reduces the cost of compliance but also improves effectiveness and efficiency. These new technologies benefit from machine learning, natural language processing and large language models to reduce the manual burden and help to improve the client experience.
You’ve led some high-profile monitorships for US and UK regulatory authorities. How did this come about and what kind of safeguards did you provide?
US and UK regulatory authorities typically allow banks to provide them with a list of three firms – with one highlighted as their top choice. It’s then up to the regulatory authority to decide who gets selected. When undertaking independent reviews on behalf of regulators, my role is to consult with the firm to ensure they understand where their program has regulatory gaps, how they compare to other firms so they can learn from them, and finally help them achieve regulatory compliance.
Describe yourself in three words.
Optimist, conscientious, striver.
We always end on a light note! If you were trapped on a desert island with three other people (excluding friends and family) who would they be and why?
Megan Hine, the explorer and survivalist, so I can learn survival tips from her. My favourite chef, Nigella Lawson, so I don’t starve. And, finally, my tennis coach – I’ll have ample time on my hands, so plenty of time to perfect my game for when I return to civilisation!
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