Block Hosts Third Quarterly Law Enforcement Summit in Oakland
Maintaining a secure and trusted platform goes beyond just building safe products — it extends to engaging effectively with key partners and stakeholders across the industry to foster strong relationships, shared knowledge, and more collaborative and effective industry-wide practices.
Building upon our prior Summit in Washington, DC, we recently hosted our third quarterly Law Enforcement Summit in Oakland and convened more than 80 law enforcement representatives with Block’s legal and compliance leaders to discuss how we can best tackle financial crimes together.
Block has taken a multifaceted approach to combating financial crimes, which includes leveraging technology such as machine learning models to monitor for and detect suspicious behavior on our platform. Machine learning has been key to understanding the use of many of our products, but it’s been especially helpful in identifying certain behaviors that may indicate illicit activity. During our recent summit, Chris Nasrallah, Block’s Head of Machine Learning for Financial Crimes Compliance, presented examples of how this technology evolves to help us proactively catch bad actors and report them to law enforcement for quicker investigation and prosecution.
As part of our financial crimes compliance program, Block files suspicious activity reports (SARs) leveraging machine learning models as part of the transaction monitoring program. Illicit activity can span across multiple platforms and while our transaction monitoring is an important part of how we detect suspicious activity, partnerships with law enforcement are helpful to gain the full picture. The Summit presentations included an opportunity to introduce attendees to the names and faces behind Block’s Financial Crimes and Law Enforcement Response teams, who explained our processes for handling information requests and identifying records that may be of interest for a law enforcement investigation.
Several of Block’s law enforcement partners were in attendance, including representatives from Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigations (IRS-CI), among others. Presentations and remarks were made by Block leadership including Counsel Lead Chrysty Esperanza, as well as Megan Gonzales, Cash App’s Head of Financial Crimes.
Building trust is an initiative that spans our entire business, with several cross-functional teams creating new safety features, educating our customers, and working on investigations directly. Our partnership with law enforcement agencies and NGOs is a critical component to this effort.
Maintaining a secure and trusted platform goes beyond just building safe products — it extends to engaging effectively with key partners and stakeholders across the industry to foster strong relationships, shared knowledge, and more collaborative and effective industry-wide practices.
Building upon our prior Summit in Washington, DC, we recently hosted our third quarterly Law Enforcement Summit in Oakland and convened more than 80 law enforcement representatives with Block’s legal and compliance leaders to discuss how we can best tackle financial crimes together.
Block has taken a multifaceted approach to combating financial crimes, which includes leveraging technology such as machine learning models to monitor for and detect suspicious behavior on our platform. Machine learning has been key to understanding the use of many of our products, but it’s been especially helpful in identifying certain behaviors that may indicate illicit activity. During our recent summit, Chris Nasrallah, Block’s Head of Machine Learning for Financial Crimes Compliance, presented examples of how this technology evolves to help us proactively catch bad actors and report them to law enforcement for quicker investigation and prosecution.
As part of our financial crimes compliance program, Block files suspicious activity reports (SARs) leveraging machine learning models as part of the transaction monitoring program. Illicit activity can span across multiple platforms and while our transaction monitoring is an important part of how we detect suspicious activity, partnerships with law enforcement are helpful to gain the full picture. The Summit presentations included an opportunity to introduce attendees to the names and faces behind Block’s Financial Crimes and Law Enforcement Response teams, who explained our processes for handling information requests and identifying records that may be of interest for a law enforcement investigation.
Several of Block’s law enforcement partners were in attendance, including representatives from Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigations (IRS-CI), among others. Presentations and remarks were made by Block leadership including Counsel Lead Chrysty Esperanza, as well as Megan Gonzales, Cash App’s Head of Financial Crimes.
Building trust is an initiative that spans our entire business, with several cross-functional teams creating new safety features, educating our customers, and working on investigations directly. Our partnership with law enforcement agencies and NGOs is a critical component to this effort.