This month FIRE Solutions is featuring a document called, "Anti-Money Laundering - Regulatory Focus" This excerpt from one of our courses, AML Current Issues 2009, highlights the emerging money laundering trends and efforts by enforcement agencies to eliminate them. From this article, you will learn the following:

• How economic conditions are once again ripe for the movement of "hot money" (illicit funds) from Russia to the United States and other currency safe havens.
• Why regulators and law enforcement agencies are moving aggressively to prevent mortgage loan fraud and related money laundering cases.
• What the FATF has put into special alerts over the expanding use of Internet payment systems to launder money.
• Which regulators are placing greater emphasis on financial institutions' proper implementation of enhanced due diligence (EDD) on correspondent accounts maintained by and for non-U.S. Citizens.

Click here for your copy of the "Anti-Money Laundering - Regulatory Focus" document.

For a more detailed explanation of the AML Regulatory Focus, contact one of our sales representatives to enroll in our AML Current Issues 2009 Firm Element Continuing Education course, or one of our Annual Compliance Meeting topics

AML Current Issues 2009 reviews the most current and prominent AML rules violations, penalties and fines imposed against banking and broker dealer firms. The objective is to highlight what, where, why and how some firms went astray and also to show how often the root cause of the problem lay in failure to develop, document, implement and properly (independently) test AML and CIP procedures.

The more detailed case studies and current issues reviewed in this course highlight real-world schemes and how they were pulled off. While money-laundering operations often originate away from the immediate view of financial institutions, substantial sums ultimately find their way into banks and broker/dealer firms.

In this Firm Element Continuing Education course, your representatives will learn how Money Laundering Schemes were detected and reported by alert representatives who noticed when "things just didn't add up" and decided to probe a bit further. These actions ultimately resulted in arresting the money laundering activity and preventing the representative's firm from unwittingly facilitating the illegal activity.

Other Key Updates

Annual Compliance Questionnaire? Conflict of Interest? Outside Business Activities? Rep Registration Renewal? FIRE's BlazeQNA questionnaire service can address these and many other needs. Click here for more details.

FIRE now offers CFP Certification Training! Through a partnership with Boston University and Acadient, FIRE is now offering CFP Certification Training that's 100% online. For more information, contact Eric Sternbach at esternbach@firesolutions.com.

FINRA elearning courses are now available through FIRE. Click here for more details.

We have added 35 new Firm Element CE courses to our catalog for 2009, and updated the remainder. For a copy of the catalog click here.

FINRA's deadline for updating your reps' U4s is November 30. If you haven't yet addressed this need, FIRE has a quick and cost-effective solution.