It’s Always Day One: Rethinking Financial Crime in a Converged World

“It’s always Day One” sounds like a startup cliché… until you hear it from someone who’s spent his career on the front lines of threat finance.

In this episode of Fraud Forward, host Hailey Windham sits down with Ari Redbord (Global Head of Policy & Government Affairs at TRM Labs) to unpack how financial crime prevention is evolving as crypto, traditional finance, and AI-driven scams collide. Ari’s path spans federal prosecution in D.C., the U.S. Treasury, sanctions and terrorism financing, giving him a rare view of where policy, investigations, and technology actually meet.

Hailey and Ari get real about what “public–private partnership” should mean in practice (spoiler: not more roundtables), and why real-time disruption networks are the model forward. They break down why “crypto crime” is a misleading label, how blockchain transparency changes investigations, and what TradFi still does better when it comes to governance and mature controls.

They also dig into the operational reality teams are wrestling with right now: AI moving faster than regulation, scams scaling with generative tooling, and the risk of falling behind if fraud and compliance don’t learn how to harness new tech without losing human judgment.

The core takeaway is simple: the threats are moving faster, across more rails, and complacency is the real risk, so the mindset has to stay Day One.

Guest lineup:

• Ari Redbord: Global Head of Policy & Government Affairs at TRM Labs
• Hailey Windham: Host of Fraud Forward and Community Banking Lead at Sardine