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The purpose of this paper is to provide a conceptual discussion and analysis of the Covid-19 impact on financial crime and regulatory compliance. The analysis is conducted to make a comparison of the financial crime and regulatory compliance patterns before and after the Covid-19 pandemic occurred.

This paper contextualises the impact of Covid-19 on financial crime and regulatory compliance. Moreover, this paper explores different ways of conceptualising the Covid-19 impacts in terms of financial crimes and regulatory compliance patterns based on the surveys by PricewaterhouseCoopers and Deloitte.

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought both challenges and opportunities to financial crime and regulatory compliance. In the aspects of financial crime patterns, this study found a reduction in physical crime whilst on the other hand increment in cybercrime. Nevertheless, this study discovered regulatory compliance not at a satisfactory stage even before the Covid-19 pandemic, let alone during the pandemic.

This study implies that the financial institutions must work together to combat the risks of financial crimes, not only amongst the institutions but also with the regulators. Digitalisation and robust risk management need to be improved at a massive level to beat the criminals’ high fintech skills and systems. The initiatives of fund packages from the governments to assist the companies especially the small firms need to be fully used by the companies to improve regulatory compliance.

Whilst some studies discussed the impact of Covid-19 on the economy, there are still scarce resources on the comparative analysis on the financial crime and regulatory compliance, not to mention the before and after effect of the Covid-19 pandemic. This is the first paper to integrate the issues surrounding the Covid-19 impact, financial crimes and regulatory compliance in Malaysia.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the importance of innovation for the performance of small firms in the construction sector. Furthermore, this paper also examines the influence of several factors related to entrepreneurial capital (entrepreneurial value, business strategy, experience and training) on small firm performance in the sector.

This study uses primary data of 255 small firms in the construction sector under the category of small contractors (G1). Stratified sampling method was utilized for data collection, which is then analyzed using the descriptive and multiple regression analysis to achieve the objectives of the study.

The findings showed that the factor of innovation and several factors related to entrepreneurial capital (entrepreneurial value, business strategy and business experience) have a significant positive relationship with the performance of small firms in the construction sector. However, factor of training indicated a significant negative correlation with small firm performance.

Although this study found a significant impact in explaining the factors that affect performance, particularly in the construction sector, it only takes into account only some internal factors (entrepreneurial capital and innovation). Proposed future research should consider a variety of other factors mainly related to external factors, such as economic development, growth potential, industry structure, internal social capital and government policy.

This study provides clear implications related to the theory and contributions to the literature related to research in the construction sector. The study also provides invaluable insightfulness to various stakeholders including policy makers, institutional support and small contractors about the importance of innovation and entrepreneurial capital in determining the performance of small firms in the sector.

The results provide supportive evidence that entrepreneurial values and business strategy are important internal factors in determining the performance of a firm, which is consistent with the theory of resource-based view. Experience and training factors, as indicators of firm performance, are articulated in the theory of human capital. Hence, the findings not only can strengthen both the theories but also make a significant contribution to the literature of the study, particularly in the construction sector.

This paper aims to provide an empirical analysis of the effects of regulatory enforcement and customer risk determinants on money laundering risk judgment. The study further explores the moderating impact of regulatory enforcement on compliance officers in the banking and money service business (MSB) sectors. The analysis is conducted to find the important factors that contribute to the issues of risk judgement among compliance officers to establish effective anti-money laundering (AML) and countering financing of terrorism compliance at the financial institutions, as highlighted in the National Risk Assessment Report 2017 by the Central Bank of Malaysia.

An experimental study with four different scenarios of case studies distributed to 124 compliance officers at the banking and MSB sectors was conducted via online platforms. The paper uses a quantitative approach via structural equation modelling.

The result shows a significant effect of customer risk determinants and regulatory enforcement on money laundering risk judgement, taking into account competency as the control measure. A further test on the interaction effects of both determinants shows a significant result on the money laundering risk judgement. The empirical evidence indicated that regulatory enforcement influenced compliance officers’ money laundering risk judgement and suspicious transaction report submission. In other words, the banking and MSB sectors’ AML compliance significantly depends on the regulators’ enforcement activity.

This study is limited to two independent variables: regulatory enforcement and customer risk determinants. Future studies may consider other factors affecting compliance officers’ money laundering risk judgement, such as technical competency, knowledge management, digitalization and technology and ethical issues.

This study provides several theoretical and practical implications. Emphasizing the excellent quality of judgement and, eventually, good quality of reporting the suspicious transactions will not be achieved merely from enforcing fines and punishment, but comprehensive measures must be taken. Increasing the competency and training, educating the compliance officers, supporting the industry and practitioners with incentives and digitalization, enhancing the campaign and awareness among the public and standardizing the policy shall be the good initiatives for the regulatory enforcement to establish.

This paper provides a valuable contribution to the body of knowledge and fulfills the significant gaps in the literature on money laundering, not to mention, the integration between behavioural studies and anti-money laundering compliance, which has scarcely been statistically evident from the research studies.