You can't keep a good entrepreneur down, as Charles Intriago has proven with his latest multiple-choice examination and accreditation service, the Association of Certified Financial Crime Specialists.

You can't keep a good entrepreneur down, as Charles Intriago has proven by 'changing the name and doing the same' with his latest multiple-choice examination and accreditation service, the Association of Certified Financial Crime Specialists. By all accounts, the ACFCS is doing well against its old rival, the Association of Certified Anti-Money-Laundering Specialists or ACAMS, which Intriago started more than a decade ago and then sold to Fortent for a good price.

The ACFCS exam consists of 145 scenario-based, four-option multiple-choice items, or questions. For ACFCS members, the CFCS examination fee is $995. Persons in a government or military agency or academic institution in any country pay $695. The examination fee for non-ACFCS members is $1095. ACAMS was - and presumably still is - run along similar lines. It earned good money in the days when Intriago ruled it by stipulating that accredited people had to keep annual payments up if they wanted to retain the letters 'CAMS' after their names. It is unknown whether this is the case at the ACFCS.

The Ministry of Financial Services of the Bahamas - which at independence in 1973 changed from being dominated by British culture and cricket to being dominated by American culture and baseball - recently granted 15 scholarships in alliance with Intriago's new body. A scholarship bestows on the holder an ACFCS study manual, access to an online ACFCS course, two days of lectures and access (if that is the right word) to the examination. On the mainland US, the University of New Haven has begun to collaborate with Intriago on a new financial crime course. A senior lecturer there has described the partnership as 'unique', suggesting that ACAMS has not taken the initiative with this kind of collaboration.

The subjects are wider than in the early days of ACAMS and cover FATCA, bribery and corruption, data security, 'ethics' and international standards as well as the inevitable money-laundering.

ACAMS is thought to have made Intriago more money even than Money Laundering Alert, the magazine he founded in 1989 and which he also sold to Fortent many years ago.