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Financial crime presents a serious threat to the stability and integrity of the global financial system. To combat illicit financial activities, regulatory bodies worldwide have implemented various measures, including the requirement for financial institutions to assess the financial crime risks they are exposed to in the jurisdictions they operate in. These risks include inadequate anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism frameworks and other financial crime risks that have significant strategic implications for firms’ geographical footprints and customer risk classifications. This paper aims to make a contribution to the literature by undertaking a cross-country analysis of 158 countries to shed light on what drives perceived jurisdiction risk of the UK financial services firms.

Capturing firms’ perceptions of financial crime risk requires significant data collection efforts, including surveys and interviews with key personnel. This can be highly resource-intensive and may require access to sensitive information that firms may be reluctant to share. Furthermore, the dynamic nature of financial crime risks means that perceptions can change rapidly in response to changes in the regulatory and geopolitical landscape. As a result, capturing and monitoring firms’ perceptions of financial crime risks requires ongoing monitoring and analysis. Capturing firms’ perceptions of financial crime risks at a cross-jurisdictional level is a particularly complex and challenging task that requires careful consideration of a range of factors. As a result of data limitations, empirical investigation of the factors underlying the firms’ perceptions of jurisdiction risk is in its infancy. This paper uses regulatory financial crime data from the UK in a multivariate regression analysis, following a general-to-specific approach where any redundant variables were removed from the general model sequentially.

Results suggest that perceived jurisdiction risk is significantly and positively associated with evasion of tax and regulations, while it is significantly and negatively associated with political stability and regulatory stringency. These have important implications for home and host supervisors with respect to the factors that drive perceived jurisdiction risks and the evaluation of the nature of inherent financial crime risks within regulated firms. The findings confirm the critical role of the shadow economy, political stability and regulatory rigor in shaping jurisdiction risk perceptions. From a policy standpoint, the findings support the case for taking prompt policy action to identify, prioritize and implement specific and targeted measures with respect to the shadow economy, political stability and rigor of regulations to improve international firms’ perceptions of jurisdiction risk.

While there exists different measures of financial crime risk, it is notoriously challenging to capture firms’ perceptions of it, particularly at a cross-jurisdiction level. This is because financial crime risks can vary significantly across different jurisdictions due to differences in legal and regulatory frameworks, cultural norms and levels of economic development. This makes it difficult for firms to compare and evaluate the financial crime risks they face in different jurisdictions. Besides, firms’ perceptions of financial crime risks can be influenced by a range of subjective factors, including personal experiences, media coverage and hearsay. These perceptions may not always align with objective risk assessments, which are based on more systematic and empirical methods of risk measurement. This paper contributes to the existing literature by undertaking a cross-country analysis drawing on a unique set of UK regulatory financial crime data, which is based on a total of 1,900 annual financial crime data regulatory return (REP-CRIM) submissions to the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority.

This paper examines the role of institution in the combating crime in India. This study also assesses institutions for controlling property crime in India in the post-reform era.

Crime and socio-economic data are taken from National Crime Record Bureau and the Reserve Bank of India, respectively. Twenty major Indian states are selected for the study purpose for the period of 1994–2019. Fixed effect panel data technique is used for analysis purpose.

Property crime rate declines with economic growth, while it increases with financial development. Findings of fiscal policy instruments are different. Own tax is positively associated with property crime in India, while non-tax fiscal instruments such as fine, penalty, and so on, are inversely related to it. Property crime rate is inversely related to institutional factors like charge sheet and conviction rate.

Further research is needed for other crimes in India. State-level data are used here for analysis purpose; however, spatial or cluster analysis techniques might provide more insights for combating crimes in India.

This study suggests that economic growth and fiscal instrument along with institutional development are essential to control property crime in India.

Government should take steps to improve the law-and-order system to control property crime across states.

Impact of non-tax fiscal instrument reduces property crime while that of own tax is increases it in India. These findings are unique and added certain insight in the study. Institutional roles are captured its performances like charge sheet and convict rate, which are significantly reduce property crime in Indian states. Least square dummy variable model is applied to capture individual state effects.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-01-2023-0063

This paper aims to explain the implications of the impending establishment of national blockchain infrastructure by governments around the world, and how these structures can be integrated with existing legislation and assist in the prevention of financial crime.

The methodology used is a literature review and analysis of progress being made to establish national blockchain infrastructure. It provides a discussion of the connection between blockchain and financial crime, and how this infrastructure will interact with existing regulatory frameworks, and particularly, financial crime legislation.

This paper documents financial crime risks posed by digital currencies and smart contracts and the role that national blockchain infrastructure can potentially play in mitigating these risks. It highlights the need for governments to devote resources to developing this infrastructure and associated regulatory frameworks.

There are few, if any, academic papers in the financial crime, or wider literature, that have examined the potential for national blockchain infrastructures prevent financial crime, including the implications for existing regulation in the field.

News items like “A whopping 2 lakh gullible investors were cheated…….” amply illustrate the extent of problems and hardships caused by financial frauds related to Ponzi schemes, collective investment schemes (CIS), unregulated deposit schemes, etc. In India, over the years, many Ponzi and unregulated investment schemes have taken place, causing huge economic and financial loss to Indian economy. This paper aims to examine why investment such schemes like Ponzi schemes and CIS become popular, how such schemes got operated in different periods and what could be done to safeguard the interests of investors.

The analysis is done based on secondary data and research work of various researchers, organisation and institutions, which are available in the public domain.

This paper has tried to analyse various characteristics of such fraudulent schemes, like their modus operandi, promotional activity, background of promoters and legal process involved in recouping financial loss of millions of investors. This paper also examines the demand-side factors that are responsible for popularity of those schemes in India. Noting the regulatory changes and other initiative taken by regulatory authorities to control the supply of unregulated investment schemes, this paper indicates potential actions, which could be undertaken to make people aware about the risks and issues related with such fraudulent schemes.

This paper gives an overview about various aspects of unregulated investment schemes, which have duped numerous people at different point of time. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research work is original and has not been published in any other journal.

This paper aims to show how financial services firms determine whether customer transactions or behaviours meet the threshold for suspicious activity reporting mandated by the Terrorism Act 2000 and the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, and how suspicious activity reporting is executed in practice.

Semi-structured interviews have been carried out among compliance professionals in UK financial services.

Two issues related to suspicious activity reporting have been identified. Firstly, a widespread misunderstanding about the tipping-off offence under s. 333 Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 has been identified, which appears to be a root cause for poor quality as well as over-reporting of suspicious activity. Secondly, issues related to the notice and moratorium periods used by the UK’s National Crime Agency appear to deter reporting of suspicious activity related to live transactions.

The paper makes suggestions for changes financial services firms and the UK’s National Crime Agency can make to improve the effectiveness of suspicious activity reporting.

The paper provides valuable insights which can be used to limit the flow of criminal funds, improve the quality of suspicious activity reporting and enhance the effectiveness of law enforcement agencies.

This paper aims to investigate technological innovations within the crypto space that have engendered novel financial crime risks and their potential utilization amidst geopolitical conflicts.

The theoretical paper uses an analysis of recent geopolitical events, with a key focus on using cryptocurrencies to undertake illicit activities.

The study found that cryptocurrencies and the innovations made within the crypto domain are used for both legitimate and illicit purposes, including money laundering, terrorism financing and sanction evasion.

This research contributes to understanding the critical role cryptocurrencies play amidst geopolitical conflicts and emphasizes the need for regulatory considerations to prevent their misuse. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first scholarly contribution that considers the evolving mechanisms afforded by cryptocurrencies amidst geopolitical conflicts in undertaking illicit activities.

The purpose of this paper is to systematically analyze the literature around regulatory compliance and market manipulation in capital markets through the use of bibliometrics and propose future research directions. Under the domain of capital markets, this theme is a niche area of research where greater academic investigations are required. Most of the research is fragmented and limited to a few conventional aspects only. To address this gap, this study engages in a large-scale systematic literature review approach to collect and analyze the research corpus in the post-2000 era.

The big data corpus comprising research articles has been extracted from the scientific Scopus database and analyzed using the VoSviewer application. The literature around the subject has been presented using bibliometrics to give useful insights on the most popular research work and articles, top contributing journals, authors, institutions and countries leading to identification of gaps and potential research areas.

Based on the review, this study concludes that, even in an era of global market integration and disruptive technological advancements, many important aspects of this subject remain significantly underexplored. Over the past two decades, research has lagged behind the evolution of capital market crime and market regulations. Finally, based on the findings, the study suggests important future research directions as well as a few research questions. This includes market manipulation, market regulations and new-age technologies, all of which could be very useful to researchers in this field and generate key inputs for stock market regulators.

The limitation of this research is that it is based on Scopus database so the possibility of omission of some literature cannot be completely ruled out. More advanced machine learning techniques could be applied to decode the finer aspects of the studies undertaken so far.

Increased integration among global markets, fast-paced technological disruptions and complexity of financial crimes in stock markets have put immense pressure on market regulators. As economies and equity markets evolve, good research investigations can aid in a better understanding of market manipulation and regulatory compliance. The proposed research directions will be very useful to researchers in this field as well as generate key inputs for stock market regulators to deal with market misbehavior.

This study has adopted a period-wise broad-based scientific approach to identify some of the most pertinent gaps in the subject and has proposed practical areas of study to strengthen the literature in the said field.

The current study focuses on many risk categories that have emerged in the digital ecosystem of the financial technology industry, which has dramatically changed traditional financial systems as a result of innovations in financial technology.

The Web of Science Core Collection database was used to find a data set of 719 pertinent papers on the subject encompassing the year 2015–2023. The sample procedure was carried out utilising the PRISMA approach. The keywords were first gathered relating to technological risks in banking sectors and after confirming the keywords, the authors performed the search by the “topic” which covers “title” in the search bar. On February 15, 2023, the Web of Science database was searched using the terms “Cyber security risk OR data theft OR financial crimes OR financial stability risk OR operational risk OR default risk OR money laundering OR financial terrorism AND FinTech AND banking sector”. Two-step approach is applied in this study. First, descriptive analysis is applied using RStudio to highlight prominent authors, countries and affiliations. Furthermore, relationship among authors, countries and keywords is shown by using three fields plot. Second, using VOSviewer, co-occurrence of keyword analysis is used to determine the most influential themes.

The findings show that 2,611 documents have been published from 2016 to 2023. Year 2021 is the most productive year in terms of number of publications. The results also show that WANG XC is tied for the position of most prolific contributing author. In a similar vein, the United States leads the world in publication output. Furthermore, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics in China is leading the list with 15 articles. The results from the co-occurrence of keywords reveal that “default risk”, “operational risk”, “money laundering”, “credit risk”, “corporate governance”, “systematic risk”, “financial stability risk”, “risk management” and “crises” are the frequently keywords.

The results of this study are beneficial to academia and industry in order to advance their current understanding of FinTech and associated concerns. This work expands the understanding of the technology hazards facing the banking industry from a broad perspective.

The purpose of this research is to analyze the role of gender in the commission of white collar crimes and investigate it in five countries: Norway, Portugal, America, India and Iran.

Descriptive analytical method is used in this article.

A total of five observations were examined about the rank and percentage of women's participation in white-collar crimes, namely, from Norway (rank 3, 7%), USA (rank 26, 5%), Portugal (29th rank, 13%), India (rank 135, 11%) and Iran (rank 143, 5%). As is visually obvious, there seems to be no relationship between the level of gender equality and the percentage of women involved in white-collar crimes. However, according to Hobbs, in most research, the issue of gender and its effect on the occurrence of white-collar crimes have not been addressed, but by using the limited statistics and limited information available, it can be concluded that a small number of women have committed this crime. According to global crime reports, only 15 out of 200 prosecutions for white-collar crimes involve women.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this article is original and has been submitted only to this journal and has not been submitted to another journal at the same time.

Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) are having a major impact on banking (FinTech), health (HealthTech), law (RegTech) and other sectors such as charitable fundraising (CharityTech). The pace of technological innovation and the ability of AI systems to think like human beings (simulate human intelligence), perform tasks independently, develop intelligence based on its own experiences and process layers of information to learn ever-complex representations of data (ML/DL) means that improvements in the rates at which this technology can undertake complex, technical and time-consuming tasks, identify people, objects, voices, patterns, etc., screen for ‘problems’ earlier, and provide solutions, provide astounding benefit in economic, political and social terms. The purpose of this paper is to explore advents in AI, ML and DL in the context of the regulatory compliance challenge faced by financial institutions in the United Kingdom (UK).

The subject is explored through the analysis of data and domestic and international published literature. The first part of the paper summarises the context of current regulatory issues, the advents in deep learning, how financial institutions are currently using AI, and how AI could provide further technological solutions to regulatory compliance as of February 2023.

It is suggested that UK financial institutions can further utilise AI, ML and DL as part of an armoury of solutions that ease the regulatory burden and achieve high levels of compliance success.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to specifically explore how AI, ML and DL can continue to assist UK financial institutions in meeting the regulatory compliance challenge and the opportunities provided for financial institutions by the metaverse.