ACFCS Member Spotlight: For Bottomline’s Dalit Amitai, fighting fraud, bolstering compliance defenses is an ‘all in’ effort to better harness technology, empower teams, thwart creative criminals

By Brian Monroe
bmonroe@acfcs.org
September 9, 2022

Dalit Amitai knows that criminals, whether they are cyber hackers, fraudsters or money launderers, are infinitely creative – always looking for a way to breach systems, steal from customers or cleanse sullied funds through an institution.

The reason she is so well-versed in their schemes and scams: she has devoted nearly 30 years of her career to stopping them.

Amitai commands a deep well of expertise in banking, technology and systems engineering, development and implementation.

While she started her career first in IT, architecting enterprise solutions, she has expanded into the areas of fraud and, more broadly, financial crimes compliance and risk management – an in-demand background as more scams have become cyber-enabled and paid in crypto coins.

That experience propelled Amitai to her current position as the VP of Global Operations and Services, Fraud and Financial Crime at Bottomline Technologies.

The company, headquartered in Portsmouth, NH, offers advanced fraud detection, behavioral analytics and regulatory compliance solutions.

The company, with offices across the U.S., Europe, and Asia-Pacific, also provides corporations and banks an array of systems and technology to engage in domestic and international payments, efficient cash management, automated workflows for payment processing and bill review.

In recent years, fraud – the spiritual sister of the anti-money laundering (AML) compliance program – has surged for a bevy of reasons.

With rampant identity theft and fraudsters adapting to pandemic challenges, it has become even more critical for financial institutions to better detect and stop fraud, to better protect their customers and themselves.

Such a stratagem is also and be more in line with recently-released national fincrime compliance priorities from the U.S. Treasury.

The priorities released last year by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) include many of the top tactics organized criminal groups, fraud syndicates and cyber-enabled scammers generated illicit finance.

The widely-watched and highly anticipated AML priorities are the first concrete update to implement the U.S. Anti-Money Laundering Act (AMLA) – the most significant upgrade to the country’s fincrime framework since the 2001 U.S.A. Patriot Act.

FinCEN’s stated AML priorities are:

• corruption;
• cybercrime, including relevant cybersecurity and virtual currency considerations;
• foreign and domestic terrorist financing;
• fraud;
• transnational criminal organization activity;
• drug trafficking organization activity;
• human trafficking and human smuggling; and
• proliferation financing

Apart from fraud being a standout priority for the U.S. government, schemes have been soaring for many reasons, in part fueled by the fear, loneliness and anxiety of living through two years of a global pandemic.

Criminals in that time have become more adept at using love as a weapon in romance scams.

They have played on the financial desperation, or greed and avarice, in the human heart with foreign lottery schemes.

Massive hacks against companies and governments around the world have made it easier than ever for criminals to dig up this digital identity heap and create clones they control.

Banks have also had to retool and retrain their AML and fraud teams to better understand and more quickly realize the interconnection between certain fraudulent activities and, later, money laundering.

For instance, in far too many romance, lottery or other related scams, once the person has their bank account emptied, the fraudsters then further victimize the person by turning them into a money mule.

That is one of the important lessons Amitai has learned and is a secret to her success: Even in the biggest software project, it isn’t all just about technology – it’s about people.

In every project, there are stakeholders, in the bank, facing pressure from bank examiners to be more effective and results-oriented and there are also real people, bank customers, who could be victimized by fraudsters.

“Accept that there is a life on the project and that customer engagements are a journey,” she said. “Always be a good listener and be respectful of everybody that you work with. Be humble in every situation.”

No one knows everything and everyone can change and grow, at any stage of their career.

That philosophy is what fueled Amitai’s desire to jump into the fraud space.

It is an area she feels where she can be “all in” and make the most of a diverse skillset, shepherding institution technology upgrades from start to finish, from idea to implementation, testing to tuning and finally, release – better detecting and preventing fraudsters from hurting a bank or its clients.

The need for banks to banks to upgrade their AML and fraud fighting systems to more advanced technologies – including things like artificial intelligence, automation and machine learning – has coincided with a stronger focus on data analysis and data even moving to cloud storage.

This means, maybe more than ever before, the software and systems banks use have turned from a one-and-done exercise to software-as-service, meaning these technology companies are more partners than simply sellers.

“The transition to the cloud made the industry switch from selling software as a vendor to providing software as a service, including code progression, model validation, security and audit certifications,” Amitai said.

Even so, while she has built a reputation on attention to details in complex systems implementations, Amitai can also pull back and see the big picture, feeding her passion purpose feedback loop.

Amitai was kind enough to share some of her knowledge and skills in our latest ACFCS Member Spotlight: