As a Brit, I've never had the sense the UK (specifically the City of London) has any genuine interest in tackling money laundering. I suspect our economy is structurally reliant upon us being extremely good at it.
Our money laundering supports freedom, while theirs supports tyranny etc.
I love the whole “unexplained wealth” concept the UK developed, curiously enough after Abramovich had been running around buying Chelsea etc. If you are friend to MI6 this week you are allowed to do anything, but if you get on their wrong side you will be Berezhovskied.
Having worked at FinTechs and in finance in general that doesn't ring true at all. The FCA definitely takes anti-money laundering checks quite seriously.
e.g. (off the top of my head) NatWest were fined £264 million for AML breaches.
I'm no expert by any means but if I wanted to flout the rules I'd definitely consider a few other juristictions before the City.
AML tech is so primitive, it almost looks like it's designed that anyone 'in the know' will know how to not be detected.
Eg. Most AML checks are done because someone wrote some triggering keyword in the payment reference field. Do we honestly think a criminal mastermind won't manage to come up with something else to write there?
The AML you are thinking of is designed to catch small time crooks and drug mules (and maybe also dumb terrorist supporters). They are not really designed (or more specifically deliberately obtuse towards) Slavic oligarch money. Not all "corruption" and money laundering are treated equally. Places like London (not to mention Jersey), Switzerland, and Singapore are more for good old fashioned siphoning-of-national-assets type of corruption where there's almost always a "clean" paper trail to back things up. Also, don't get tax dodging mixed with money laundering. There are plenty of processes required by OECD and similar orgs, e.g. the concepts of a LEI number, that are not really useful against real oligarch/state level money launderers.
Here's a simple example: You lived in a former USSR/iron curtain state. During the chaos of '89 you managed to "acquire" lots of assets or finagle yourself into owning former public companies/real estate/factories. The paper trail is clean as far as your typical London banks are concerned because you are merely liquidating assets you own in your own country where there's a full paper trail (regardless of whether it was attained through illegitimate means). Alternatively, in a different narrative, you a rich international student from similar types of countries and you just happened to have "rich parents" who have plenty of money to throw around. It's a very different threat model than for example trying to prevent grassroots terrorism financing.
Money laundering vs tax evasion have a lot of overlap but don't get them confused. They are very different threat models from the perspective of the service provider (and it's also why many smaller foreign banks refuse to accept Americans as customers, partially because of the paperwork required to stay compliant with Uncle Sam).
If you want an actual no-questions-asked romp of organized crime type of money I believe the current main contenders are the middle eastern states like Dubai (pre Iranian conflict at least).
Rumor through the financial grapevine is that ironically there are many GCC middle eastern royalty/pseudo-royalty currently under house arrest who are trying to do the opposite i.e. get their assets out of the country because their main bank accounts are frozen domestically. So basically real life Nigerian princes.
(As for why they are under house arrest, it's kinda out of scope for HN but mostly because of domestic political purges, especially in Saudi Arabia from what I heard)
The rich international student pipeline has always stood out to me – we've seen dozens of 30, 40 or even 50 storey skyscrapers built for students, enjoying lifestyles usually reserved for those in high finance.
Well, I assure you most London bankers won't lose any sleep given that the money is often from Gulf states/places like China/ex Soviet oligarchies/various forms of corruption in the global south. The countries where the money flow out from often lack the means to actually pursue and prosecute overseas, especially for what boils down to "white collar" offences/corruption. It's only when anything like terrorism/organized crime/anything involving Uncle Sam's tax revenue occurs then the banks AML processes might become useful for more than just check-the-box compliance.
You will often find that entrepreneurs and digital nomads get caught in this sort of of AML debunking web because the paltry 6-7 figs of business/personal transactions across countries often resemble mules/illegitimate businesses and the banks are not allowed to talk about it. (Just go to the subreddit for wise or PayPal and search for the keyword "frozen")
Meanwhile international students can easily bring in 8 figs to buy houses and that's perfectly fine because it's "clean" as far as the compliance department is concerned. It's also a cultural issue, fintech platforms and neobanks try very hard to use heuristics to automate compliance. It's also what I recommend digital nomads to use a proper cross border bank like HSBC Premier. You pay a lot more but you get a lot less of the "account frozen" bullshit.
Feelings about Palantir aside, this is a really misleading headline. The FCA has hired Palantir to "investigate the watchdog’s internal intelligence data", which presumably requires Palantir to have access to that sensitive data.
Saying that Palantir is "reaching" into the British state, and then having the article image be "billionaire Donald Trump donor Peter Thiel" literally holding a wad of cash is... not exactly a high standard of reportage.
And that's the most believable thing in the image. From the banknotes, to the rather visible outline on Thiel himself, to what I can only describe as an out-of-focus picture of the supernatural entity from Still Wakes the Deep.
> Palantir has previously defended its work, saying it has led to about 99,000 extra operations being scheduled in the NHS
No hard evidence of this was provided or is readily available.
> helped UK police tackle domestic violence
And precisely how was this done?
> Palantir will have to destroy data after completion of the contract
Contractual obligations that are not practically enforceable will not be honored. I don't think these individual administrative agencies have the acumen necessary to correctly negotiate these contracts.
Can't find the article atm, but it was basically pre-crime from Minority Report (without the pre-cogs, obviously). They looked at large datasets and built a predictive model, correlating things like race and prior criminal history to infer who was more likely to re-offend. At scale, this works. Ethical issues abound, however.
We're going to need a definition of "works." The false positive rate seems to be notable since those stories readily percolate into media whenever these schemes are implemented and the damage done from those is absolutely massive.
The idea that criminals are likely to re-offend is not new. What to do about this has always been the challenge. Simply over policing this segment is not any type of solution. Unless, of course, you are invested in the "private prison" industry.
> No hard evidence of this was provided or is readily available.
That's not their job, that's the governments' job. So much of this (the article and your comment) is putting so much on Palantir when they are just doing the job asked of them. They don't work for the people, the government does.
As a Brit, I've never had the sense the UK (specifically the City of London) has any genuine interest in tackling money laundering. I suspect our economy is structurally reliant upon us being extremely good at it.
I think the power is knowing who is moving what and where
Our money laundering supports freedom, while theirs supports tyranny etc.
I love the whole “unexplained wealth” concept the UK developed, curiously enough after Abramovich had been running around buying Chelsea etc. If you are friend to MI6 this week you are allowed to do anything, but if you get on their wrong side you will be Berezhovskied.
Isn't the whole point of the City of London, to be a legal money laundering economic zone, that brings banks, corporations, money and jobs to the UK?
Pretty much, yes.
Really? What are you basing that on?
Having worked at FinTechs and in finance in general that doesn't ring true at all. The FCA definitely takes anti-money laundering checks quite seriously.
e.g. (off the top of my head) NatWest were fined £264 million for AML breaches.
I'm no expert by any means but if I wanted to flout the rules I'd definitely consider a few other juristictions before the City.
AML tech is so primitive, it almost looks like it's designed that anyone 'in the know' will know how to not be detected.
Eg. Most AML checks are done because someone wrote some triggering keyword in the payment reference field. Do we honestly think a criminal mastermind won't manage to come up with something else to write there?
The references are almost irrelevant. The banks + fintechs have far more depth than that.
The AML you are thinking of is designed to catch small time crooks and drug mules (and maybe also dumb terrorist supporters). They are not really designed (or more specifically deliberately obtuse towards) Slavic oligarch money. Not all "corruption" and money laundering are treated equally. Places like London (not to mention Jersey), Switzerland, and Singapore are more for good old fashioned siphoning-of-national-assets type of corruption where there's almost always a "clean" paper trail to back things up. Also, don't get tax dodging mixed with money laundering. There are plenty of processes required by OECD and similar orgs, e.g. the concepts of a LEI number, that are not really useful against real oligarch/state level money launderers.
Here's a simple example: You lived in a former USSR/iron curtain state. During the chaos of '89 you managed to "acquire" lots of assets or finagle yourself into owning former public companies/real estate/factories. The paper trail is clean as far as your typical London banks are concerned because you are merely liquidating assets you own in your own country where there's a full paper trail (regardless of whether it was attained through illegitimate means). Alternatively, in a different narrative, you a rich international student from similar types of countries and you just happened to have "rich parents" who have plenty of money to throw around. It's a very different threat model than for example trying to prevent grassroots terrorism financing.
Money laundering vs tax evasion have a lot of overlap but don't get them confused. They are very different threat models from the perspective of the service provider (and it's also why many smaller foreign banks refuse to accept Americans as customers, partially because of the paperwork required to stay compliant with Uncle Sam).
If you want an actual no-questions-asked romp of organized crime type of money I believe the current main contenders are the middle eastern states like Dubai (pre Iranian conflict at least).
Rumor through the financial grapevine is that ironically there are many GCC middle eastern royalty/pseudo-royalty currently under house arrest who are trying to do the opposite i.e. get their assets out of the country because their main bank accounts are frozen domestically. So basically real life Nigerian princes.
(As for why they are under house arrest, it's kinda out of scope for HN but mostly because of domestic political purges, especially in Saudi Arabia from what I heard)
Thank you for a very detailed explanation.
The rich international student pipeline has always stood out to me – we've seen dozens of 30, 40 or even 50 storey skyscrapers built for students, enjoying lifestyles usually reserved for those in high finance.
It just seems very suspect to me.
Well, I assure you most London bankers won't lose any sleep given that the money is often from Gulf states/places like China/ex Soviet oligarchies/various forms of corruption in the global south. The countries where the money flow out from often lack the means to actually pursue and prosecute overseas, especially for what boils down to "white collar" offences/corruption. It's only when anything like terrorism/organized crime/anything involving Uncle Sam's tax revenue occurs then the banks AML processes might become useful for more than just check-the-box compliance.
You will often find that entrepreneurs and digital nomads get caught in this sort of of AML debunking web because the paltry 6-7 figs of business/personal transactions across countries often resemble mules/illegitimate businesses and the banks are not allowed to talk about it. (Just go to the subreddit for wise or PayPal and search for the keyword "frozen")
Meanwhile international students can easily bring in 8 figs to buy houses and that's perfectly fine because it's "clean" as far as the compliance department is concerned. It's also a cultural issue, fintech platforms and neobanks try very hard to use heuristics to automate compliance. It's also what I recommend digital nomads to use a proper cross border bank like HSBC Premier. You pay a lot more but you get a lot less of the "account frozen" bullshit.
You should also take a look at this
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43001441
https://hansard.parliament.uk/search?searchTerm=palantir
Previously:
"US to embed Palantir AI across military" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47471655
"The singularity".
Are we seeing the beginning of super-corporations that will supersede nation states?
Feelings about Palantir aside, this is a really misleading headline. The FCA has hired Palantir to "investigate the watchdog’s internal intelligence data", which presumably requires Palantir to have access to that sensitive data.
Saying that Palantir is "reaching" into the British state, and then having the article image be "billionaire Donald Trump donor Peter Thiel" literally holding a wad of cash is... not exactly a high standard of reportage.
> literally holding a wad of cash
And that's the most believable thing in the image. From the banknotes, to the rather visible outline on Thiel himself, to what I can only describe as an out-of-focus picture of the supernatural entity from Still Wakes the Deep.
Guardian doing clickbaity headline specifically to infuriate their readers, I am shoketh
> Palantir has previously defended its work, saying it has led to about 99,000 extra operations being scheduled in the NHS
No hard evidence of this was provided or is readily available.
> helped UK police tackle domestic violence
And precisely how was this done?
> Palantir will have to destroy data after completion of the contract
Contractual obligations that are not practically enforceable will not be honored. I don't think these individual administrative agencies have the acumen necessary to correctly negotiate these contracts.
>And precisely how was this done?
Can't find the article atm, but it was basically pre-crime from Minority Report (without the pre-cogs, obviously). They looked at large datasets and built a predictive model, correlating things like race and prior criminal history to infer who was more likely to re-offend. At scale, this works. Ethical issues abound, however.
> At scale, this works.
We're going to need a definition of "works." The false positive rate seems to be notable since those stories readily percolate into media whenever these schemes are implemented and the damage done from those is absolutely massive.
The idea that criminals are likely to re-offend is not new. What to do about this has always been the challenge. Simply over policing this segment is not any type of solution. Unless, of course, you are invested in the "private prison" industry.
> No hard evidence of this was provided or is readily available.
That's not their job, that's the governments' job. So much of this (the article and your comment) is putting so much on Palantir when they are just doing the job asked of them. They don't work for the people, the government does.
> [Palantir] The Miami-based company, co-founded by the billionaire Donald Trump donor Peter Thiel
And backed by In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital (CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency of the US).
https://fortune.com/2025/07/29/in-q-tel-cia-venture-capital-...
Not really surprising given it was founded post-9/11 to stop another 9/11.
Even google was funded by In-Q-Tel.
Alex Karp will be held accountable eventually. I can’t think of anyone more evil than that rat fucker
What's he done that's so evil...?