Lisa Osofsky, a prominent contributor to our web-pages, is now the head of the UK's Serious Fraud Office. Her background as a tough prosecutor at the US Department of Justice promises to stand her in good stead.

The SFO is a regulator in the sense that it is the supervening authority for financial firms' anti-bribery-and-corruption (ABC) efforts, evaluating firms' 'adequate procedures' that are mandated by section 7. The Financial Conduct Authority has chosen to stand back from any evaluation of anti-fraud measures, arguing that it is not a fraud regulator.

The new director is keenly aware that criminals thrive on volatility. She noted in a recent speech that many fraudsters read the headlines about IT failures at Lloyd’s TSB - failures in which the Financial Conduct Authority played a less-than-capable hand - and jumped on the bandwaggon instantly, leaving many innocent victims in their wake.

She also wants to give the SFO better software. In 2016 the SFO famously deployed an AI robot to check for legal professional privileged material in the Rolls Royce case, which led to savings of 80% in the areas in which the SFO deployed it - a new development for criminal investigations. The SFO also has an eDiscovery platform which it is starting to use in its new cases. The next step is to introduce machine learning software and artificial intelligence to work alongside the legal professional robot. This might help it reach decisions about whether to charge people sooner - a boon for an organisations whose cases seem to take forever. Such IT is used already in civil cases, where money is no object.

Lisa began her career working as a US federal prosecutor, taking on white collar crime cases including defence contractor and bank frauds, money laundering and drug related conspiracies. She spent five years as Deputy General Counsel and Ethics Officer at the FBI and was seconded to the SFO whilst a Special Attorney in the US Department of Justice’s Fraud Division. She was also called to the Bar in the UK.

She worked for Goldman Sachs International as its Money Laundering Reporting Officer and spent seven years at the spy firm of Control Risks, specialising in compliance. Until very recently she worked for Exiger, a global governance, risk and compliance advisory firm that was originally set up to help HSBC with its remediation problems after various US authorities fined it $1.9 billion in 2012. The FCA, incidentally, has still not issued the banking giant with a single fine for its rip-roaring decade of money-laundering transgressions.