Dr Gauri Sinha discusses current challenges in financial crime and regulation, and the threats emerging in the digital world.
The Rights and Freedoms Research Cluster within the Department of Law and Criminology at Royal Holloway, University of London engages in impactful, multi-disciplinary research. The cluster provides a forum for its members to share ideas and information, as well as to support each other’s research.
The cluster members have expertise, which spans through a variety of disciplines and subjects. In this news article, we have uploaded a recent interview with a newly appointed lecturer at the Department of Law and Criminology: Dr Gauri Sinha.
With practical experience arising from her job as Subject Matter Expert in Financial Crime for PwC, Dr Gauri Sinha presents a practice-informed analysis on the key challenges in the financial regulatory world. She observes that the issues around the new risk-based approach advocated in her research are founded in its implementation and lack of communication between the private and public sector, rather than the contents of the framework itself.
In view of the rapidly evolving and innovative trends occurring in digital crimes, Dr Gauri Sinha explores in a recently-recorded interview how imperative it is for the financial industry, academics, and the law to dynamically adapt to new challenges, in order to ensure equal and fair treatment of the parties before the law, and accountability for crimes.
More in detail, the heart of interview revolves around a discussion on the risk-based approach adopted by actors in the financial sector. Dr Gauri Sinha identifies that the new framework has led firms to defensively comply with guidelines, like a tick-the-box exercise. The risk-based approach advocated by Dr Gauri Sinha is more progressive than the former rule-based approach, as it offers firms a greater degree of flexibility. Dr Gauri Sinha submits the issues lay in the practice of the rules as opposed to the theory behind them.
In the second part of the interview, Dr Gauri Sinha explores the current landscape of corporate prosecution. In the area, she articulates the need for a stronger commitment to prosecute rogue individuals. This would offer a better deterrent for financial crimes as the current key mode of punishment is fines which are proving to be ineffective due to only representing a small percentage of a firm’s earnings.
Finally, Dr Gauri Sinha covers some of the issues around accountability when artificial intelligence machines produce unlawful results. The interview concludes with an outline of Dr Gauri Sinha’s research goals and recent achievements, such as advising the Jamaican government on their domestic financial legislation.
The interview was recorded with the technical help of Mariam Diaby, a researcher working at the Department of Law and Criminology at Royal Holloway, University of London on this project. The interview forms part of a video-based research project under the supervision of Prof Jill Marshall who leads the Rights and Freedoms research cluster and who received competitive funding through the Reid Research Fund to undertake the project.
