Sarah K. Runge is an executive managing director in K2 Integrity’s Financial Crimes Compliance practice. She works with fintech firms and financial institution clients to review and improve their financial crime compliance policies and practices to ensure compliance with U.S. and global requirements. Sarah helps clients develop and implement relevant financing policies, procedures, and risk assessment tools, with a focus on digital assets and other emerging technologies and cross-border payments.

Prior to joining K2 Integrity, Sarah was global director of regulatory compliance policies, programs, and governance at Meta FinTech Compliance (a division of Meta), where she led teams responsible for managing global compliance programs including policies, governance, outsourcing, exam management, internal audit, and all aspects of issue management (ingestion, remediation, and closure). Her department managed all licensed and regulated products in Brazil, Ireland (for the EU), the U.K., and the United States, including regulatory engagement, risk assessments, training, regulatory reporting, exam responses, and compliance with AML requirements.

Before her time at Meta, Sarah was the global head of FCC regulatory strategy for Credit Suisse’s financial crime compliance division, where she developed and managed a global regulatory risk management and communication strategy, including creating a global process to identify and analyze new regulations, guidance, policies, and enforcement actions that impact the bank and creating a process to assess and compare regulatory exams and internal audits globally to improve exam and internal audit preparedness and outcomes. She also provided advisory guidance to the bank’s New York branch related to Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) requirements including Customer Due Diligence (CDD), Section 312 of the USA PATRIOT Act, and other regulations.

Prior to Credit Suisse, Sarah spent over ten years in the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes, the last five as the director of the Office of Strategic Policy. Sarah led a team that developed domestic and international initiatives to address illicit finance through work with supervisors, law enforcement, and policy makers in the United States and globally. Her work included leading the U.S. delegation to the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and representing the U.S. Treasury Department at the G-7, the G-20, and the Financial Stability Board.

A thought leader in the financial crimes compliance space, Sarah speaks regularly at events globally on a wide variety of AML/CFT topics, including the BSA and regulatory developments (including AMLA 2020), the use of new technologies, financial transparency including CDD and beneficial ownership, the FATF recommendations and global implementation of AML/CFT measures, de-risking, barriers to information sharing, and correspondent banking.

Sarah holds a M.A. in international affairs from Johns Hopkins University, with concentrations in international economics and European studies, and a B.A. in history, with a minor in German studies, from Scripps College.