US Enterprise-Wide Risk Assessment (EWRA) requirements have evolved to address emerging financial crime risks and regulatory expectations. Financial institutions are expected to enhance their #EWRA frameworks to ensure comprehensive risk identification, assessment, and mitigation strategies and national risk assessments play a critical foundational role.

National Threat Assessments, such as the US Treasury’s National Money Laundering Risk Assessment (NMLRA), National Terrorist Financing Risk Assessment (NTFRA), and National Proliferation Financing Risk Assessment (NPFRA) identify and describe current and emerging financial crime risks. They form the baseline for risk awareness and all institutions should begin with the threats identified in national assessments and evaluate how relevant they are to their customer base, product offerings, geographic footprint and other factors.

Now that you have decided each threat’s relevance to your business, you should use those threats to calibrate your inherent risk scoring to ensure alignment with regulators’ view of systemic threats. For example, If a sector or region is flagged as high-risk (e.g., real estate, shell companies, certain foreign jurisdictions), that should increase inherent risk scores.

National assessments contain real-world typologies (e.g., fentanyl trafficking, cybercrime, human trafficking). EWRAs should demonstrate awareness of these typologies and link them to the institution’s customer and transaction monitoring strategies. This ensures that you have the most up to date risk typologies and can identify Emerging risk Trends.

The key output of a threat assessment is a portrait of the threat landscape. Hybrid Threat Finance does just that. HTF shows you what bad actors exist, how they operate, and what they’re targeting so the financial services can accurately assess who the threat actors may be in their businesses and how they may be using their products and services.