Financial institutions, regulators and development partners now treat weak anti-money laundering controls as a serious business risk. A single failure can lead to regulatory penalties, de-risking by correspondent banks and exclusion from international payment networks. At the same time, criminals adapt quickly, using shell companies, trade invoices, digital wallets and cash-intensive businesses to hide the origin of funds. Staff at every level therefore need a clear picture of what the rules require and what suspicious behaviour looks like in daily work.

The Fundamentals of AML / CFT & Financial Crime Analytics Training Course starts with the basics: the nature of predicate offences, the three stages of laundering, how terrorist financing differs, and the international framework set by the Financial Action Task Force and its regional bodies. Participants then work through the compliance programme step by step, including enterprise risk assessment, customer onboarding, ongoing monitoring, record keeping, staff training and reporting to the financial intelligence unit. The analytics component introduces data preparation, pivot tables, thresholds, peer-group comparison and link charts so that participants can interrogate transaction data themselves.

Teaching is practical and paced for newcomers. Short briefings are followed by case files, red-flag exercises and a closing simulation in which participants investigate a set of linked accounts and draft a report for the money laundering reporting officer.

By the end of the course, participants will be able to:

• Describe how money laundering and terrorist financing operate and why they harm institutions and economies.
• Explain the FATF Recommendations and how the risk-based approach shapes a compliance programme.
• Carry out customer due diligence, including beneficial ownership checks and politically exposed person screening.
• Assign customer and product risk ratings and decide when enhanced due diligence applies.
• Recognise common red flags across banking, mobile money, trade and cash-intensive businesses.
• Use spreadsheets to profile transactions, set simple alert rules and highlight anomalies.
• Draft a clear suspicious transaction report and preserve the supporting evidence.

The course suits staff and professionals who are new to financial crime compliance, including:

• New compliance and anti-money laundering officers
• Bank tellers, customer service and relationship staff
• Credit and operations officers in banks and SACCOs
• Microfinance and mobile money supervisors
• Internal auditors and risk analysts
• Lawyers, accountants and real estate agents who handle client funds
• Staff of regulators, supervisory bodies and financial intelligence units
• NGO finance officers managing donor and remittance flows

Participants leave with:

• A one-page map of the laundering cycle and the controls that interrupt each stage.
• A customer risk-rating template they can adapt to their own products.
• A red-flag checklist grouped by channel and customer type.
• A worked spreadsheet model for flagging unusual transactions.
• A drafted suspicious transaction report with an evidence log.
• A personal plan for improving AML practice in their own team.

The programme is paced for newcomers and kept hands-on through:

• Short briefings that define each concept in plain language
• Anonymised case files drawn from banking and mobile money
• Spreadsheet labs that need no programming experience
• Role-play of customer onboarding and escalation conversations
• A closing investigation simulation with group feedback

On completing all five days and the practical exercises, participants are awarded a CPD-accredited Certificate of Completion by Vision Reach Global Consultancy.