Biography

Tom Keatinge is the founding Director of the Centre for Financial Crime and Security Studies (CFCS) at RUSI, where his research focuses on matters at the intersection of finance and security.

He is also currently a specialist adviser on illicit finance to the UK Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee ongoing enquiry.

He has a Master’s in Intelligence and International Security from King’s College London, where he studied the effectiveness of the global counterterror finance regime. Prior to joining RUSI in 2014, he was an investment banker for 20 years at J.P. Morgan.

His research on finance and security considers a number of themes including:

  • The financial dimension of state threats: the methods by which adversaries seek to undermine Western democracies and exploit their financial systems via the use of ‘active financial measures’.
  • Sanctions: the effectiveness and evolution of sanctions regimes.
  • Terrorist financing: the effectiveness of current approaches to terrorist financing; the use of financial intelligence as a security tool; and the evolution of terrorist financing methods and responses.
  • Proliferation financing: the role of finance as a tool of disruption in combatting state and non-state actor proliferation ambitions.
  • Organised crime: assessing the financial dimension of priority transnational threats, including the illegal wildlife trade, environmental crime and human trafficking.
  • New approaches to tackling financial crime: the role of public/private partnership and information sharing.
     

Tom Keatinge has contributed to a variety of publications and media outlets; has given evidence to UK parliamentary and US congressional hearings and spoken at a range of high-level multilateral forums including the UN Security Council and the Financial Action Task Force and a number of its regional bodies.

View Tom Keatinge's website for external publications.

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As political leadership on both sides of the Atlantic begins to appreciate the security threat posed by illicit finance, our aim with the TARIF is to ensure we achieve the step-change in response that is needed.

Tom Keatinge

Director, CFCS / Centre for Financial Crime and Security Studies

Taskforce on a Transatlantic Response to Illicit Finance

TARIF aims to strengthen global democracy by identifying viable ways in which the UK and US can combine efforts in tackling illicit finance.

RUSI State Threats Taskforce (STT)

RUSI’s State Threats Taskforce (STT) aims to support the UK and its partners in detecting, understanding, attributing and responding to the spectrum of complex state threats currently facing democracies.

Finance and Statecraft Programme


Filthy Lucre Podcast - Episode 2: The Sanctions Game

Are sanctions worth it? Journalist Richard Brooks welcomes leading economic crime specialist Tom Keatinge to Filthy Lucre Podcast - 22 August 2022 (28 Minute Listen)

The Business Interview - The New Statesman

“No one in government cared until the war”: how the UK left it too late to fight financial crime - Interview with Tom Keatinge, 15 March 2022

Latest publications

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