Dr Bill Peace

Visiting Senior Research Fellow, Kings College

 

Bill Peace advises the NGO Stop the Traffik on the development of information sharing and analytical capability across different stakeholders involved in countering human trafficking. This work focuses especially on relations between the finance and NGO sectors and includes the development of a cross sector information sharing hub with a shared ownership model. Formerly he worked in the UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency where he directed its programmes on information sharing, intelligence management and data analytics, and led the work of UK’s national Financial Intelligence Unit and suspicious activity reporting regime.

Bill is a security and intelligence professional of some 30 years standing. Most recently he served in the leadership of the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA). Prior to that he worked for the National Criminal Intelligence Service, and in various Civil Service roles embracing policy and operational aspects of defence, security, intelligence, counter-terrorism and protection.

In SOCA, he had responsibility for developing the intelligence management strategy and related capabilities. This included establishing the open source intelligence unit and overseeing information legal issues such as the operation of authorities under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and compliance with the Data Protection Act. He led the development of approaches to intelligence exploitation through ‘big data’ analytics and data fusion, and worked on problems of corruption by organised crime.

Bill also led the UK’s national Financial Intelligence Unit, which resided in SOCA, managing a significant element of the national response to the threat from money laundering and terrorist financing, including the UK’s regime for national reporting of suspicious financial activities and transactions. In addition he held portfolios for managing strategy, international law enforcement cooperation through Interpol, and corporate risk.

 

As  a Deputy Director in SOCA,  he had oversight of a significant component of the UK’s  national anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing effort, with responsibility for the work of the UK Financial Intelligence Unit and the Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) regime, including the development of data analytics approaches to exploiting SARs intelligence. In this role he was involved frequently in liaison with FSA on policy  issues.  Since leaving SOCA, as a Senior Visiting Fellow at Kings College London he has worked on the application of open source intelligence techniques to due diligence in regulated industries. He acted as an advisor to the work of Transparency International on the vulnerability of the UK property sector to corrupt money flows and is a member of the research advisory panel for RUSI’s  Future of Financial Intelligence Sharing project which will report later this year. He also acts as an advisor for the counter-human trafficking NGO Stop the Traffik on intelligence and money laundering issues