Meet Becky, our VP of Financial Crime
The Financial Crime team works to protect Tide’s members from criminals and ensure that criminals don’t use Tide! We’d love for you to meet the people behind the Financial Crime team – so first up, here’s Becky.
👋Hi Becky! Introduce yourself in a sentence.
I’m Becky and I head our Financial Crime department here at Tide. My job is to protect Tide’s members from criminals and ensure that criminals don’t use Tide!
What’s your background?
Most recently I worked for FINTRAIL, a financial crime consultancy that works with a lot of FinTech companies (financial technology). This meant I got to work with many different FinTechs on some really exciting projects, and help build out their anti-financial crime controls, processes and teams. Before that I worked at HSBC in their Financial Intelligence Unit, where I investigated customers that were involved in things like huge money laundering networks, breaching sanctions, tax evasion, and terrorist financing. I also used to work for a private security company, who did security in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, and I worked for LOCOG on the Olympics in intelligence, looking for potential threats to the Olympic games. When I was at university doing my undergraduate I was a Special Constable (volunteer police officer), and I also did a masters in Countering Organised Crime and Terrorism. So I’ve always worked in security and crime in some capacity.
How did you cross paths with Tide?
I was actually working for FINTRAIL, and Tide was one of my clients. I’ve worked on various projects with Tide since 2017, and I always loved the opportunity to come back to Tide to work on projects.
Typical working day:
No two days are the same, but my days are very busy and typically consist of a lot of meetings! I work with departments throughout Tide to continuously refine and improve our anti-financial crime systems and technology, plan financial crime controls for new product launches, conduct training, advise the financial crime analysts on more complex cases, review reports that go to law enforcement, work with our banking partners on all sorts of issues, and generally ensure we are doing the best we can to stop and catch criminals. The wonderful KYC team that is responsible for onboarding our new members also falls under my department, so I advise where necessary on any potential members and ensure that any applications that cannot be processed automatically are being done as quickly (but thoroughly) as possible by the team. I told you it was busy!
What’s your biggest source of motivation?
Knowing the work that we do here at Tide is keeping our members safe and stopping criminals. Behind every financial crime is a victim, and often behind financial crimes such as money laundering is horrible crimes like people trafficking, or defrauding businesses or people out of their savings. That’s why I take my job so seriously and we do everything we can to stop financial crime happening through our platform, and if it does, trying to catch them as soon as possible and return the money to the victim. Nothing feels better than when you manage to save someone’s money who has been a victim of crime, and you know that money will go back to them.
If you had to choose one aspect of our culture that defines you the best – which one would it be and why?
I’d say ‘mission driven’. I’m really passionate about fighting financial crime and our mission in the Financial Crime department is to do just this.
What’s a common thing that the Financial Crime team deals with?
On a day to day basis, the team will be dealing with alerts, which is where our systems have detected unusual activity that could indicate financial crime, they will liaise with banks and our banking provider Prepay Solutions to shut down accounts known to be associated with financial crime, filing reports of criminals to law enforcement, message our members about their account or to ask for more information, onboarding our new members and ensuring we know enough about them and their business, and generally working very hard to protect our customers and Tide from criminals.
What’s the most interesting case you’ve came across since you joined Tide?
We had a large money laundering network who were registering companies on Companies House and then setting up Tide accounts, under the guise of a genuine business. The network was defrauding victims out of a lot of money and using Tide to launder the proceeds. Luckily, we were able to use our clever tools to find connections between customers, and common patterns of behaviour, and we managed to shut the network down and report them to law enforcement.
When you’re not at Tide, what’s your favourite thing to do?
Be with my dogs! I have two dogs, Bella and Lily, that occasionally come into the office as everyone loves them. Lily is a puppy and has endless energy, Bella is a little bit older and just wants to sit on my lap the whole time.
