The Honorable Juan Zarate is Global Co-Managing Partner & Chief Strategy Officer for K2 Intelligence Financial Integrity Network (K2-FIN). 

He is the chairman of the Center on Economic and Financial Power, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and a senior fellow at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center. He was a visiting lecturer in law at the Harvard Law School for eight years and is a published author, including his books “Treasury’s War” (2013) and “Forging Democracy” (1994). 

For clients, Mr. Zarate has successfully provided expert counsel and strategic guidance on complex internal and international financial investigations; managed multi-disciplinary teams advising on global anti-money laundering and sanctions compliance remediation; and overseen financial integrity-related reforms for public and private institutions. He has also led some of the largest asset recovery ventures in history, including the return of over $3 billion in Iraqi assets. 

Mr. Zarate has advised on the most challenging anti-money laundering and financial integrity enforcement issues facing the private sector, working with key financial intelligence units, regulators, Finance Ministries, prosecutors, and law enforcement agencies around the world. 

For over five years, Mr. Zarate sat on the board of the Vatican’s Financial Information Authority (appointed twice by Pope Francis as the U.S. representative to oversee the Vatican’s anti-money laundering reforms). For seven years, he was the U.S. advisor on HSBC’s Financial System Vulnerabilities Committee (overseeing remediation of the bank’s anti-money laundering system and adherence with the U.S. DOJ deferred prosecution agreement). He sits on the boards of various organizations, including Northwestern Mutual, Boston Dynamics, and the Director’s Advisory Board for the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). 

Mr. Zarate served as the deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism (“counterterrorism czar”) from 2005 to 2009, where he was responsible for developing and implementing the U.S. counterterrorism strategy and policies related to transnational security threats, including anti-money laundering, kleptocracy, and transnational organized crime. He was the first ever assistant secretary of the treasury for terrorist financing and financial crimes. In this role, he led the post-9/11 anti-money laundering and sanctions regime expansion in the United States; helped develop the international standards for AML/CFT and proliferation finance; supervised the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN), the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), and the Treasury’s Executive Office for Asset Forfeiture (TEOAF); drove the innovative use of the Treasury’s national security–related powers and ultimately the establishment of the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (TFI). 

Mr. Zarate is a former federal terrorism prosecutor, prior to 9/11, and a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College and a cum laude graduate of the Harvard Law School.