Risks of the Future: A Special Report

[Music] um as Rachel said my name is Dick and Johnson I'm the CEO and founder of Themis uh an award-winning digital Financial crime platform based here in adgm and I'm really excited today to be announcing the publication of our new report risk 4.0 managing the financial crime risks of the fourth Industrial Revolution so I've got a copy here and my friends are at the door if you would like a copy you can scan it using the QR code or you can take one of the um postcards on your way out as well um this is a report that covers the impact of emerging Technologies on financial crime and it's been very much written in partnership with the executive office of anti-money laundering and counterterrorism financing and with adgm the the report launches today right here and now so you are the first to see it um for all of you here at ABAB Finance week um so why are we talking about technology risk in this great Center of innovation we've heard uh lots of talks before about how um technology can be used as a really um strong force for good in the fight against Financial crime and that is true as a founder of a financial crime tech company I believe passionately in that um but we must also understand the risks as well 2024 is set to be a major inflection point for technology globally with AI chatbots synthetic identities 3D printing and virtual assets all continuing to make headlines and so it's important to understand The Good the Bad and the Ugly of emerging Tech and importantly the way criminals are using some of this cutting egg technology to steal our data our money our identities and in some cases even cause a threat to life now it's not all that bad at Themis we understand the tremendously positive role that technology can play in fighting Financial crime and we've spent the last four years building the next generation of advanced AI powered solution so that we can easily assimilate and make sense of millions and millions ions and millions of data points structured and unstructured data points to make sure that you don't have any direct or indirect or unwanted connections to organized crime frauders and other forms of criminality artificial intelligence machine learning and natural language processing all allow us to connect the dots in new ways exposing hidden connections patterns and links to elicit activity and in so doing it gives us the tools to stop criminals in their tracks and prevent them from causing that damage to people to businesses to society and to the environment as we talked about earlier the UAE has invested a lot of money into Tech such as ours and it's incredible to see the ecosystems we have here in Abu Dhabi um with the executive office of AML and CTF adgm hub 1 and others all providing the space and infrastructure for develop developers to keep innovating the UA is rapidly becoming recognized as a global leader leveraging Tech in the fight against Financial crime and there are many many more examples of the impressive work being done here to leverage tech for good but at the same time let's take stock of the financial crime vulner abilities that new tech creates as well and that's really the impetus of this report so we need to understand how criminals are leveraging this technology in order to ensure that we can protect ourselves and our businesses against these threats we've all watched as generative AI has come to dominate the tech landscape over the past year or two and while there is so much good in this power there is increasing concern over the use of things like chatbots being used to write highly sophisticated convincing language for fishing and for other scams and indeed some of my own team members have received emails and whatsapps reportedly from me in my language and in my style celebrating their successes if only I was that nice for them another increasing risk is the use of deep fakes and other synthetic media the number of deep fake related scams undertaken globally in the first three months of 2023 has far outstripped the whole of 20122 by a large large margin so in just three months this year there are more deep fake scams than the whole of the year before so you see the emergence of that as a use by criminals to capture Their audience The Internet of Things So devices are also increasingly being exploited by criminals with over 15 billion connected iot devices globally at the start of 2023 criminals are targeting them to carry out crimes such as data theft and denial of service attacks and we see also in the report examples where even health systems are being targeted pace makers now you can imagine the the damage that that can cause this is scary stuff but the key question for us all is what can we do about these risks Financial crime cuts across all sectors of the economy and so must be tackled through a whole system response and we heard that a little bit earlier with Muhammad charo's panel at Themis we like to work collaborative with both the public and the private sector um to help companies with the systems and tools that they need to detect these threats and Tackle these issues we're protecting firms from both the legal and Regulatory risk but also um the uh reputational damage that that may incur with any of these unwanted associations so our research report therefore seeks to be of practical value for both the public sector here and the private private sector who are looking to deploy the next generation of technology for good within their firms to stay one step ahead of those criminal activities the report covers key threats and examples of what goes wrong but also can look at Key recommendations that firms can use to protect themselves from this threat and with that in mind I would like to invite our research partner the executive office of anti-money laundering and counterterrorist financing to present some of the report's key recommendations it's been an absolute pleasure to collaborate with them on this project so ladies and gentlemen if I could ask you to welcome onto the stage is Mel Muhammad senior legal adviser for the UA federal government executive office of anti-money laundering and counterterrorism financing thank you very