Federica is a Partner at Interpath Advisory, where she co-leads a team of regulatory experts who assess and investigate regulatory and financial crime concerns on behalf of regulators and enforcement agencies globally and who assist financial institutions in responding to regulatory scrutiny and building better controls.
In her career, Federica has held a wide range of roles covering advisory, control, policy/regulation drafting and operational design and delivery.
Amongst other things, Federica has led the financial crime unit for a regulator, drafted the virtual assets regulation for a jurisdiction, and designed Financial Crime risk management strategy and policy framework for a universal bank. Federica has conducted investigations for and served as a strategic advisor to the Malta Financial Services Authority (MFSA) and Malta Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit (FIAU) on the topic of financial crime; is a Board Director of Malta’s ACAMS Chapter and AML
Intelligence and a senior adviser to the EU AML/CFT Global Facility on the topics of beneficial ownership and virtual assets.
Federica regularly advises regulators, governments, and competent authorities in preparation for upcoming FATF assessments, or in response to them.
Federica has extensive experience of assisting clients not only in the traditional financial services but also gambling/gaming operators, payment service providers, fintechs and virtual asset service providers. She has advise a large gaming group through a regulatory visit and investigated the shortfalls of a network of gaming operators, crypto exchanges and payment service providers that enabled the facilitation of large-scale money laundering.
Federica has led and been involved in numerous of the recent large-scale investigations (Swedbank, Latvian/ABLV flows, organised crime) on behalf of regulators in Europe and the US, including a dual-track (criminal and regulatory) investigation into a major universal bank that revealed the facilitation of significant terror-related activity.
Federica translates her direct, hands-on, experience of investigating complex financial crime schemes (encompassing illicit use of shell companies/complex ownership structures, cryptocurrencies, hacking incidents, ransomware scams, identity theft schemes and bribery and corruption) involving a wide range of jurisdictions (including Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Malta, Cyprus, UK, US, Sweden, Italy, Libya, Hong
Kong, the BVI, Panama, Bermuda and Curacao) into practical advice for supervisors and regulated firms and advises regulators and law enforcement agencies as to how to build and improve (intra-) jurisdictional infrastructure to prevent an investigate financial crime.
In her early career, Federica set up and co-led an independent firm consulting financial services and government agencies in Europe on quantitative risk management and general compliance.
Later, Federica held senior compliance and control roles (including Head of Compliance and MLRO) in industry setting up and leading control and compliance units. She also led the regulatory affairs team that negotiated (with, inter alia, the FCA, PRA, HMT and European Commission) the terms of the Banking Licence Application for a retail and commercial bank.
Federica is a frequent speaker and writer on various financial crime topics, the predicate offences that drive it, the small (but impactful) shortfalls that cause illicit flows to pass through the financial system, the consequences of financial crime and to provide pragmatic advice as to how to remediate them.
