Fetishism. It used to be about feet, or bindings, or beatings but now it's about being seen in the company of others who, blindly, follow the latest fetish. It's fashion taken to a level that distorts economies, societies even thinking.

I have read, often, about "priorities" set by supranational bodies, industry groups, governments and regulators. This is, mostly, fine, if they are setting priorities for themselves because, governments in particular, have to allocate resources. It is not fine for regulators to do it because regulators allocate the resources of those they regulate. The imposition of priorities by regulators, is centralised control of a type that is neither in the interests of society nor the regulated businesses.

Governments must decide where to place their resources in relation to both education and enforcement. That's their job. But by slicing crime into many subdivisions, the education fails and it fails because if society is compelled to focus on, for example, people trafficking, then less attention is, inevitably, paid to e.g. drugs trafficking. The entire point of emphasis, be it in speech or policy, is to make one thing stand out as more important.

Yes, if you are a victim of people trafficking, that is the most important. For you. But for society, the illegal trade in legal drugs, e.g. Fentanyl, is a bigger threat yet it is downgraded.

Some say that the primary concentration should be on "organised crime". Absolutely. Yes. Of course. But only for the police, prosecutors and the courts. For the man in the street or the bank clerk or, even, the money laundering reporting officer "organised crime" is not a thing. The "thing" is the actual crime, not the way in which it is managed.

We cannot and should not tell MLROs, etc, to consider "organised crime" as a priority. Whether it is organised comes from data which is collected from multiple sources by the FIU and analysed to assess connections between persons.

The term "organised crime" became popularised in UK politics by Noo Laybuh when its candidates, later MPs and Ministers, would make statements to grab the headlines in advance of bad news. It was used as a diversionary tactic.

As I explain in Vol 2 of Trade Based Financial Crime, there is no universal definition of "organised crime".

For their own purposes, governments should be concerned with two things:

First, crimes against the state which includes fraud against the public purse and, therefore by extension, local authorities and qangos, many of which are actually thinly disguised government departments.

Secondly, crimes against society: crimes of private interest should not be enforced by the state although they often are.

In financial institutions, the reality is simple: people hate paperwork and will find a way to simplify it and if they can't simplify it, to avoid it.

So, the routine filing of suspicious activity reports within a company is a natural response to telling front-liners to report suspicions; if they are told to look, specifically, for people trafficking, they won't: they will say "Oh, I thought it was domestic violence and we don't have to report that", for example. This is explored extensively in "Understanding Suspicion in Financial Crime."

The essential issue that must be grasped is that setting priorities for government has a fundamentally adverse result on financial institutions and those who work in them. 

If the only constant is change, the inevitable result is expense and failure. Stability pays dividends.

This is not a new phenomenon and those that think it's a good idea should look not to financial crime books but at old management books: books like Philip Atkinson, PCC 's Creating Culture Change, 1990. In it, Atkinson sets out reasons why culture change doesn't work and what to do about it. Incredibly, today, we see exactly the same reasons for failure and exactly the same resistance to correcting them. 

Top (at least in my view) is changing priorities to which the usual response is "don't bother with it - there'll be another one along in a few weeks".

Good change is material change: everything else wastes resources.

We live in a world where marketing men (and women) tell us that pink is the new black, and create a new iPhone where the only material difference is that it's pink and people queue in the street in Singapore, for example, to be the first to have a pink iPhone. 

You can't repair your own car because mechanical parts have been replaced with electronics and you can't keep your car because electronic parts cannot be repaired, only replaced. The fetishism over electronic vehicles has not taken account of the fact that we will have gone, in ten years, from a world where cars lasted 50 years or more, with maintenance, to one where they last, maybe, 15. 

We cannot, and should not, if we want any measure of success plan obsolescence into the way financial services businesses view and report crime, from the most junior to the most senior of staff and directors, from the car park cleaner to the chairman of the board, it is crime not types of crime that they should be looking for. 

Chairmen meet people in clubs, as do salesman and clerical workers; only the nature of the clubs changes - the nature of the people does not. They are both hunter (for business) and hunted (by criminals) - and arrogance usually priorities the first over the second. 

How else do so many ordinary men who flatter themselves that they have secured the attention of a woman who is far more appealing than they think they deserve end up drunk or drugged and pickpocketed in a hotel room or, even, a club toilet? 

Or captains of industry, or politicians, find their integrity compromised by ill-considered associations, photographed aboard an expensive boat or on an island or in a town house in the wrong company. Madoff, Epstein, Arnold Rothstein... 

If we tell those who work in financial services, and related businesses, to concentrate on one or even a handful of attractions, they won't pay enough attention to everything else. 

That hot creature leaning in to talk: it's a diversion while someone else dips into your back pocket.

There is a corollary: the "if you see something, say something" campaign about suspicious packages does not say "if you see a cardboard box with "bomb" written on it act fast." It says "if you see a package that raises your suspicions, report it as soon as possible."

The same thing: you suspect something, so report it. There is no need to decide what's in the package. 

The world is a complex place, attempts to rationalise it into a handful of priorities which financial institutions should follow because they are fashionable is a false approach. 

And it should be resisted.