Vanessa I. Pinto, CAMS, CAMS-Audit, CAMSRM

Vanessa is currently an independent AFC Auditor and Risk Management Consultant with a global career spanning NYC (USA), Mumbai (India) and more recently Vancouver (Canada). Vanessa’s forte lies in helping organizations to ethically interpret regulation, design risk-based AFC programs and test these programs to enable constant evolution in combating financial crime and other threats. Her current area of focus is driving AI penetration in AFC threat assessment, investigation, monitoring  and reporting. Prior to starting her own consultancy, she worked as a Director with Morgan Stanley in their Global Financial Crimes Team, and has held various roles with Barclays, EY, ONGC, A.P. Moller Maersk Group and BCI.

Vanessa is the first woman in India to achieve the CAMS-Audit credential from ACAMS and holds the CAMS-Risk Management credential too. In 2021, she delivered a webinar on ‘Algorithmic Bias and its impact on Financial Inclusion’. She is a graduate of the Compliance Career Academy at Cambridge University’s Judge Business School. Her CAMS-Audit whitepaper titled ‘Eyes Wide Shut: Understanding Unconscious Bias in AML Audits’ discusses how auditors and organizations can use research on biases to augment automated solutions and mitigate risks in the different stages of an AML audit to guard against perpetuation of those biases.

In 2014, Vanessa received the Mountbatten-Barclays Graduate Trainee Scholarship. She also holds a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and an MBA (Technology Management) from NMIMS University, Mumbai.