Making Financial Crime Look Sexy

The British Bankers Association is now in the movie business, producing an hour-long documentary entitled “The Fight Against Financial Fraud”. The movie was shown at the association’s annual conference in June, and will be available on its Web site beginning July 9.

A four-minute clip of the movie is posted on YouTube. AML vendor Norkom, whose executives are featured in the film, produced the excerpt.

You might recall that Fortify Software went the same “cybercrime is sexy” route earlier this year when it hosted a red-carpet debut for “The New Face of Cybercrime,”—also a bit of a fake-umentary—on the prevalence and seriousness of cybercrime.

The BBA’s movie-making efforts employed much of what you’d expect—the well-worn technique of showing scary news clips at the beginning to set up the seriousness of the problem, including one clip that seemed to tie AML to the London subway bombings last year. Also included were blatant plugs for Norkom’s AML technology, shots of hands typing on a keyboard, intermittent identity theft and payment statistics, and ethereal music to accompany the professional UK-accented narrator.

“Norkom allows you to become a better guard dog, so you can clearly demonstrate to the regulators that you are risk focused and you are totally in compliance,” says David Dixon, managing director of global solutions at Norkom and a former head of fraud containment strategies at The Bank of Montreal.

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