WSJ on human trafficking. This may be more global than community banks are interested in, but there are valuable nuggets.

http://blogs.wsj.com/riskandcompliance/2016/06/17/what-banks-can-do-to-fight-human-trafficking/

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Sorry about that. Here is a snippet:

Even without a regulatory or legislative mandate, multinational companies and financial institutions face pressures from customers and other stakeholders to step up and take action, said Mr. Lane. “Regulation always helps, it moves people into action faster, but even without regulations there are community, stakeholder and customer expectations that large companies take a leading position around this issue,” he said. “Irrespective of legislation I think there is an expectation that companies step up and try to tackle some of the biggest challenges we’ve got, and one of those is the treatment of humans and the ways they are abused.”

Anti-corruption tools used by banks to fight money laundering and other types of fraud can also be used to help companies combat the use of slave labor in their supply chains, said Micah Willbrand, director of AML product marketing at NICE Actimize, which provides risk advisory and compliance services. These tools include looking for red flags that often indicate financial activity associated with human trafficking, such as non-related parties using the same address, account inflows inconsistent with the nature of a business or large cash deposits attributed to businesses that don’t normally make them, he said.

Making use of software programs to conduct suspicious activity monitoring and customer due diligence, financial institutions can identify which accounts might potentially be connected to human trafficking or smuggling, said Mr. Willbrand.

For example, he cited a case last year in which Europol investigators asked a bank in Belgium to provide information about women aged 18 to 24 who were sending money from Belgium to Romania, Moldova and Ukraine. “They then started to notice a clustering of transfers going back and ended up being able to disrupt a prostitution chain in Belgium,” said Mr. Willbrand. “We are starting to see that activity. That is the role financial services can play in noticing red flags and passing them on to law enforcement. That can turn it into a case that can send some of these people to jail.”

Human trafficking almost always is associated with another criminal activity, such as drug activity or terrorism financing, and there is a correlation between human trafficking and areas with high levels of bribery and corruption, said Mr. Willbrand.