Hello!
I am a qualified Romanian lawyer with a master's degree in business law and a qualified anti-money laundering professional within the European Union. For 6 years I worked as a business lawyer within all types of firms (from small to international to Big 4), being specialized mostly in regulatory compliance, and for the last 2 years I worked as a money laundering reporting officer within a multinational financial institution.
Being a practitioner in the field of compliance for so long, I have undergone several trainings and courses myself and I’ve come to the conclusion that although valuable, most of the training programs on the market lack a practical approach.
After working in the first line operations department of a financial institution and observing from the trenches how are clients identified, what technical solutions are used for client screening, how do departments collaborate etc., I reached the following conclusion: activities within companies nowadays (especially multinational companies, where the most AML is aimed at) are so severed and the tasks have become so automated, that few people are aware of how their job impacts the rest of the company and the real world.
Moreover, the legislative inflation has made it nearly impossible for any professional (no matter how experienced and informed) to keep up to date with all the laws, regulations, directives, norms, orders, ordinances, decisions, amendments, standards, recommendations, guidelines, instructions, opinions, case-law etc.
There is also something that we cannot ignore anymore and this is the fact that the corporate life is dominated by urgency and the hustle culture, so few of us are given proper training when getting a new role.
In addition to these, scientists nowadays say that we forgot how to learn and there is also an explanation for this: the internet. Although a very valuable tool that has made our lives better and easier, it gives us the illusion of knowledge which, in short, means that our brain cannot distinguish between accessing information and possessing information. We mistake having access to information with actual knowledge and understanding of that information.
So, in my opinion, all of the above have led to the situation we see nowadays, namely: most people know legal provision by heart, but few people understand them and fewer people are able to apply them to various real-life situations. Most people perform without flaw their daily tasks, but few understand how do those tasks impact the outer world.
When I realized that I also knew a lot of information, but understood none, I started a process of re-learning and from this resulted my project through which I want to share my findings and my methods with everybody.
I hope you will find my knowledge useful!
Qualifications:
Certificate: AML Foundations for Cryptoasset and Blockchain - issued by ACAMS, February 2024
Course: AML risk assessment – methodology - issued by the Romanian Banking Institute, April 2023
Course: KYC, AML/CFT and anti-fraud: strategy and planning - issued by the Romanian Banking Institute, October 2021
Graduation of The National Institute for professional training and improvement of lawyers of Romania - 2018
Member of the Romanian Bucharest Bar - 2016
Master's degree in Business law - Law School, University of Bucharest, 2015 - 2016
Bachelor's degree in law - Law School, University of Bucharest, 2011 - 2015
