James Pusz is a director with K2 Integrity’s Financial Crimes Risk Management practice in New York. With nearly a decade of experience, James has honed his expertise in anti-money laundering (AML), Know Your Customer (KYC), and global sanctions compliance; transactional monitoring; historical reviews; audits; quality assurance; and complex investigations.
James assists a broad range of financial services clients—from prepaid credit card issuers and regional banks to large multinational financial institutions—playing a vital role in helping them to navigate compliance issues related to financial crimes, correspondent banking activity, business transactions, and wire activity. By providing timely and well-supported data, analysis, and rationale for alert dispositions, he effectively mitigates risks associated with money laundering, fraud, and terrorist financing. He also conducts in-depth, complex investigations of high-risk clientele and PEPs.
Throughout his career, James has led teams both domestically and internationally in alert clearing, case investigations, suspicious activity report (SAR) filings, KYC uplifts, and client risk rating audits. He is familiar with various systems/services, including Fiserv FCRM, NICE Actimize, SAS, LexisNexis, Sigma, and World-Check.
Before joining K2 Integrity, James was an analyst at the Center for Analytics, formerly known as the Institute for the Study of Violent Groups. There, he tracked the movements of terrorist organizations in Africa, including groups like Al Shabaab in Somalia and Kenya, using publicly available information. Additionally, he interned as an analyst in the corporate safety department of United Airlines, where he performed data analysis and visualization, creating new dashboard visualizations to simplify complex data sets.
James holds an M.B.A. in finance from Quinnipiac University and a B.S. in criminal justice from the University of New Haven. He is also a Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist (CAMS).