Opening remarks for Sarah Paquet, Director and CEO of FINTRAC at the ACAMS Assembly Canada Conference

From: Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC)

Remarks

Toronto, Ontario

November 6, 2024

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I'd like to thank ACAMS for organizing this panel and for the opportunity to join my colleagues, Jérôme and Andrea, with whom we work so closely on many critical initiatives aimed at combatting money laundering, terrorist financing and sanctions evasion in Canada and globally.

FINTRAC's mandate is broad and complex. However, our role is laser-focused on helping to protect Canadians, particularly our most vulnerable citizens, and the integrity of Canada's financial system. Collaboration is critical to our success and an overarching priority in everything that we do.

We work closely with businesses, their associations and provincial and national regulators to ensure compliance with our Act. I was pleased to have the opportunity to meet the CEOs and Boards of Canada's largest financial institutions over the past year to discuss the multifaceted risks facing the industry and how we can work together to address them.

We also work with our international partners, including our colleagues at FinCEN, to share compliance information and advance our supervisory work here in Canada.

Collaboration is also critical to our ability to generate financial intelligence for Canada's law enforcement and national security agencies and our international partners. With the reporting that we receive from businesses, we were able to assist 266 significant, resource intensive investigations last year, and many hundreds of other individual investigations at the municipal, provincial and federal levels across the country.

With the infrastructure and processes established through the Egmont Group, we also provided more than 230 financial intelligence disclosure packages to our foreign FIU counterparts to assist their money laundering and terrorist financing investigations.

We've also worked closely with our international partners, through the Egmont Group, to advance a number of key projects, including in relation to trade-based money laundering, extreme right-wing terrorism and the role of FIUs in countering sanctions evasion.

We appreciate the collaboration and support of our fellow FIUs, particularly our U.S. counterparts, as we look to share best practices and modernize. We recently co-hosted a symposium with FinCEN for a number of our FIU partners and financial institutions from Canada and the United States. The event focused on strengthening the networks between our governments and across sectors; sharing the latest trends and best practices related to specific financial crimes; and developing strategies to disrupt these criminal activities.

We're also delighted that FinCEN announced that they're joining us in strengthening and enhancing the international reach of our public-private partnerships focused on combatting the financing related to online child sexual exploitation, illegal wildlife trade and the trafficking of illicit opioids, including fentanyl.

Part of these efforts has already included working together to develop – and soon publish – updated strategic intelligence, with new and targeted indicators to help businesses to identify and report suspicious transactions related to these terrible crimes.  

We all know that criminals don't respect borders, especially when it furthers their illicit profits. It's imperative that we are aligned in our efforts in combatting these threats. More than ever, it takes a network – strong, equipped and committed – to defeat modern criminal and terrorist networks.