Search results

Money Laundering Reporting Officers (MLROs) carry out day-to-day anti-money laundering (AML) tasks while directors ultimately remain responsible for AML compliance. Therefore, directors’ expectations of what their MLROs do should ideally coincide with what their actual tasks to minimise liability risk. This paper aims to test for gaps between MLROs and their directors in terms of knowledge, expectations and performance of AML tasks. Likewise, it is researched whether MLROs and directors communicate well with regard to MLROs’ tasks.

This paper first develops a model for analysing the dyadic relationship between MLROs and their directors, based on the audit expectation-performance gap. Second, a paired electronic survey of MLROs and directors of German companies was conducted in autumn 2020, testing for participants’ knowledge, expectations and performance of possible AML tasks (n = 136 pairs).

While there is no knowledge or performance gap among MLROs and directors, expectations among them are partially unreasonable and their communication needs to be improved. Additionally, this study suggests that MLROs of German non-financial businesses are less knowledgeable, perform AML duties more poorly, and communicate less effectively with their directors.

Training of MLROs and communication with their directors need to be improved. Especially in the non-financial sector, action is urgently required.

This paper reports the results of the first paired survey of MLROs and their directors, offering unique insights into their relationship and the status of private AML efforts.

Anti-money laundering (AML) obligations follow a risk-based approach, making their extent subject to the degree of AML risk. Money Laundering Reporting Officers (MLROs) must constantly assess risks, for example, by conducting annual risk assessments of the company. The purpose of this paper is to analyse whether MLROs’ risk assessments are biased in form of a better-than-average (BTA) effect, meaning whether they favourably assess their own company’s risk compared to that of the average competitor. Additionally, MLROs’ general risk assessment capabilities are researched.

A survey of MLROs of German companies was conducted (n = 228). It tests for a BTA effect in participants’ risk assessments of their own company as well as for errors in risk assessments of other industries.

MLROs’ risk assessments are biased by a BTA effect across all industries. They view their own company’s risk to be below that of the average competitor. Additionally, MLROs are not able to correctly assess industries’ AML risks compared to the national risk assessment. Risks were especially underestimated for high-risk industries. Biases were partially found to be higher among MLROs from the non-financial sector.

Risk-based AML measures are likely to be at least partially ineffective, calling the risk-based approach into question. Regular trainings of MLROs need to include awareness for biases in risk assessments. A more stringent and effective supervision, especially in the non-financial sector, is called for.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper is the first to show that a BTA effect exists among MLROs.

Ubiquitous digital technologies are driving organisations to embrace non-traditional digitally transformed business models incessantly. Heterogeneous literature contributions have resulted in a spur in the research related to business transformation driven by digital technologies in recent years; consequently, the research under the digital transformation (DT), even though becoming a hotspot, remains very fragmented. The authors endeavour to holistically present the literature's intellectual structure under DT as a concept, its evolving journey and the emerging research streams in the business and management domains using the techniques of bibliometric analysis.

By performing bibliometric analysis on 234 research articles published over the last 20 years in the DT domain, retrieved from Thompson Reuters Web of Science ^TM, this study culls out thorough insights from the citation, co-citation and keyword analysis. Further emerging research streams were evaluated using VOSviewer software.

The study depicts an overall incremental trend of year-on-year publications, authors' performance, publication journals, associated institutions and research driving countries, along with key insights from co-citation network analysis. Furthermore, the study evaluates four research areas – organisational impacts, applied applications and insights, operational processes and social aspects, comprising eighteen research streams that comprehensively cover-up research under the DT domain.

The study contributes to the literature of DT by amalgamating the status of the present research, but more importantly, by deriving the research areas and research streams, which can be further expanded by researchers as future research streams.

For the practitioners, the study aims to act as a ready reckoner repository with practice-oriented literature references to facilitate them building knowledge and taking effective strategic decisions to harness the benefits of DT more proficiently.

This study illustrates the bibliometric structure of the DT literature and presents insights from the growth of the literature year-on-year.