AFC Trend & Typologies: Canada’s Alert on Addressing Synthetic Opioid Trafficking

Dr. William Scott Grob is a financial-crime and risk leader specializing in AML, sanctions, fraud, and emerging typologies. He previously served as director of research and analysis at ACAMS, leading global research on enforcement actions and SAR/STR trends and delivering practitioner-focused training for financial institutions, regulators, and law enforcement partners. He brings more than 25 years of experience across Freddie Mac, Deutsche Bank and HSBC. He holds a Doctorate in Management, completed Harvard Business School’s General Management Program, and maintains multiple industry certifications.

Jason Fleming is the Senior Director of AML Investigations in CIBC's Financial Intelligence unit.  With over 10+ years of AML experience across multiple roles and functions, Jason leads the largest investigative Anti-Money Laundering team in the FIU with a focus on risk mitigation and data driven intelligence.  He has worked at 2 of the 5 major Canadian financial institutions in the AML space and brings his operational and project background (Certified PMP, and Scrum Master) to the table in order to deliver the most value to his teams and the program.

I have the pleasure of leading an amazing team at CIBC as Vice President, Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) in the Enterprise Anti Money Laundering department. This team of over 350 hard-working anti-money laundering experts are focused on protecting our bank and our society from the illegal movement of money tied to criminal activity. I joined the Anti Money Laundering team in 2021, previously having held the role of Vice President, Strategy, Governance and Advisory, prior to joining the FIU.

I started my career in electronics manufacturing, where I was given a great deal of responsibility at a relatively young age – before I was 25, I was leading a team of 10 engineers responsible for a major account with annual revenue over $200M, and I was asked to travel to China for two weeks to play a major role in setting up a new manufacturing plant outside of Shanghai.

I joined CIBC in 2005, spending my first 2 years in the Process Engineering department, focusing on creating efficiencies across key retail and commercial processes. From there, I moved to the bank’s Internal Audit team, which greatly deepened my knowledge of risk, control and governance approaches.

In 2013, wanting to gain more exposure to the revenue-generating side of the business, I moved to the National Sales and Service team within CIBC to work as the analytics and insights lead for a sales leadership program known as Break Away. In this role, I produced all sales and financial reporting results, and presented those results to senior executives on a weekly basis. I was also responsible for the $18M+ project budget, and ensuring that we hit our projected benefit of over $200M.

From there, I was approached by an SVP and asked if I would consider leading a large team (200+) of field-based risk professionals within our Business Controls area. I jumped at the opportunity to develop my leadership capabilities, and took on this new challenge in 2014. In this role, I led a major transformational project, which removed administrative functions related to regulatory compliance from our frontline Banking Centres and centralized them within my team.

In 2018 I moved to Fraud Operations Management, leading a team of over 500 dedicated, hard-working fraud experts who were client-obsessed, and focused on protecting our clients and our bank from fraud losses. While in this role, fraud losses decreased, while client satisfaction and employee engagement scores soared.

I hold a Bachelor's in Engineering Science in Chemical & Biochemical Engineering from the University of Western Ontario, where I graduated first in my class. I also hold a Master's Certificate in Financial Services Leadership from the Schulich School of Business, as well as several Lean Six Sigma designations.