On 24 June 2026, compliance professionals, legal experts and financial crime specialists gathered for nCino KYC's Fighting Financial Crime Conference. Now firmly established as South Africa's premier event for FICA and AML, the 2026 edition delivered exactly what it promised: real case studies, no fluff, and content sharp enough to leave attendees informed, challenged, and ready to act. The message was clear: financial crime does not take a day off and neither can those fighting it.
Investigative journalist Pieter-Louis Myburgh of Scorpio | Daily Maverick opened the day by drawing back the curtain on South Africa's most significant financial crime patterns. From the IDT's R836 million oxygen plants scandal to the Digital Vibes PPE corruption network, Myburgh illustrated how illicit money flows through politically connected structures, how beneficial ownership is deliberately obscured, and how paper trails eventually catch up with the perpetrators. His session was a powerful reminder that financial crime has names, faces, and victims, and it is enabled, in part, by compliance failures at every level.
Pieter Rossouw of Gatekeeping Consulting made the case that most AML failures are not the result of missing policies. They are the result of misalignment between board governance and oversight, management, and compliance. “Compliance culture is not policy adherence or training completion. It is reflected in behaviour."
A highly anticipated session brought Adv. Pieter Smit of the Financial Intelligence Centre (FIC) into direct conversation with Thilomi Govender of nCino KYC, providing a rare platform for attendees to engage with a senior FIC representative. The message from the regulator was unambiguous: institutions are no longer being assessed on whether they have policies in place; they are being assessed whether their controls actually work in practice.
Adv. Carina Coetzee, Senior Public Prosecutor at the NPA, brought the conference face-to-face with the financial reality of human trafficking. Adv. Coetzee guided attendees through actual prosecution cases in which financial intelligence made the difference. Her message to AML professionals was direct: “Our collective fight against Trafficking in Persons (TIP) demands a multi-disciplinary approach that integrates expertise into every stage of investigation and prosecution.”
"Romance scams are financial crimes disguised as relationships." Sharon Knowles, CEO of Da Vinci Forensics, opened with that framing before dismantling the myth that romance scams are opportunistic. They are, she explained, highly organised criminal enterprises with scam centres, script operators, money mules, and layered cryptocurrency laundering networks operating in concert. Her session covered pig butchering schemes, deepfake technology, and blockchain investigation techniques, leaving compliance professionals with concrete red flags and behavioural markers to watch for.
Rianné Potgieter, CEO of the International Federation of Compliance Associations (IFCA), examined the intersection of financial crime risk management, artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, and emerging technologies, offering a glimpse into the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. A single fraudulent transaction can cross fraud, AML, cyber, AI, and crypto domains simultaneously, and no single team owns the complete picture. She urged institutions to close the maturity gap and shift from reactive, rules-based controls to adaptive, intelligence-led systems before the gap widens further.
The day's final session was deeply personal and profoundly important. Cynthia Stimpel, author of Hijackers on Board, shared her first-hand account of blowing the whistle on financial governance transgressions at SAA, where she uncovered an attempt to pay R256 million to an unknown company. She took the audience through the full personal cost while making the case that silence carries an even greater cost. With over R20 billion recouped through whistleblower-enabled investigations, South Africa has proof that speaking out matters. Cynthia, closed with a challenge drawn from her own mantra: "It starts with me."
The uncomfortable truth? The compliance failures Myburgh, Coetzee, and Stimpel described aren't isolated incidents. They highlight the risks that organisations across every sector, including ones just like yours - continue to face!
The Conference is a reminder that financial crime is a people’s business, and so is fighting it. From front-line investigative journalism to a prosecutor's courtroom victories to one woman's extraordinary act of courage, the 2026 Fighting Financial Crime Conference made a few things undeniable: the tools, the regulations, and the technology all matter, but it is the people in that room who make the real difference.
The verdict is in. Attendees loved it. Here's proof. See what attendees from the 2026 conference had to say! Explore more conference resources, images and videos here.