Financial crime doesn’t look the way most people imagine it, because it rarely announces itself. It hides in transaction patterns, in the gap between what a business says it does and what it actually does, in the split second between a payment being initiated and a flag being raised.
Few people understand this better than Sven Kivvistik, who has spent more than 25 years on the front line across traditional banking, mobile money, crypto, and now fintech.
Sven joined Wallester in February 2026 as Head of Financial Crime Risk & Intelligence, bringing with him a career that spans Swedbank, Ericsson, SwissBorg, and Luminor. He’s built and led AML and investigations teams across the Baltics and beyond, and navigated financial crime in some of the highest-risk environments in the industry. We sat down with him to talk about how the threat landscape has changed, what financial crime looks like inside a card-issuing fintech, and what good intelligence actually means in practice.
Interviewer: You started at Swedbank in 1999 and you’re still in the same field 25 years later. What’s kept you in financial crime?
Sven: Anti-financial crime is a constantly evolving discipline. It demands curiosity and continuous development. It also offers something rare: the opportunity to contribute meaningfully to society by making financial services safer and more trustworthy for the public.
Interviewer: And what brought you to Wallester?
Sven: The calibre of the existing team, led by Aivar Paul and Indrek Tibar, was a significant draw. Beyond that, Wallester has a compelling story – a clear ambition, genuine innovation in financial services, and real organisational momentum. The opportunity to help shape an anti-financial crime function during that growth phase was one I didn’t want to pass up.
Interviewer: So, your career has moved across traditional banking, mobile money at Ericsson, crypto at SwissBorg, and now fintech. What does that arc tell you about how financial crime has evolved?
Sven: Financial crime is inherently adaptive, and the primary driver of that adaptation is the financial services industry itself. Every significant innovation – from the introduction of credit cards and ATMs, through internet banking and mobile payments, to open banking and instant payments – has created new opportunities for criminals to exploit. It is the expansion of services and the technologies that power them that fundamentally reshape the risk landscape.
Criminals are probing each new channel for weaknesses before controls have matured. Mobile money opened financial access to millions and introduced new fraud typologies. Crypto delivered programmable, borderless value transfer and attracted money laundering operations. Fintech compressed onboarding and payment journeys to seconds and shortened the window available for detection. In each case, business innovation is followed by criminal adaptation close by. The crimes themselves are rarely new; what changes is the mechanism – the speed, the scale, and the degree of anonymity available. The underlying principles of detection and prevention remain consistent even as the environments shift, but the pace at which practitioners must apply them does not.
Interviewer: You spent time at the Estonian Information System Authority in cybersecurity. How much does that world overlap with financial crime?
Sven: Considerably. Financial services are almost entirely digital, which means cyber risk and financial crime risk are deeply intertwined. The vast majority of financial crime targeting institutions or their customers is either cyber-enabled or cyber-dependent. The threat environment also responds to factors beyond technology – during COVID-19, for instance, the rapid shift to remote working created new vectors for phishing and social engineering.
Both fields are also shaped by the same shift with regulatory philosophy: a responsibilisation strategy, as David Garland described it, that places significant responsibility for crime prevention on private sector organisations and emphasises the role of people and organisation to assume greater responsibility for self-protection against the threat of a criminal act. Wallester, as a regulated entity, plays an active role in that.
Interviewer: You went from Luminor to Wallester. Both in the Baltics, both in financial services, but very different animals. What changed about how you work?
Sven: The primary difference is the stage of development. As Wallester continues to scale, we are actively evolving our Anti-Financial Crime framework, which creates a genuine opportunity to develop the team, and grow alongside the company’s growth. That is a different challenge from operating within an established function – and, I would argue, a really motivating one.
Interviewer: Crypto is often described as a high-risk environment for financial crime. What did your time at SwissBorg actually teach you about that?
Sven: The risk is real but manageable. It simply requires a higher level of investment and effort than more traditional, localised services. I would also challenge the framing. Nick Furneaux’s 2024 handbook, There’s No Such Thing as Crypto Crime: An Investigative Handbook, makes the point well: crypto is a tool, not a new category of crime. Theft, fraud, extortion, money laundering – these predate cryptocurrency by decades. Social engineering fraud, for example, was prevalent long before Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper. Cryptocurrency is simply the modern payment mechanism; the anti-financial crime response is, in essence, the same as for fiat-facilitated crime.
Interviewer: Card issuing has specific risk characteristics. There are virtual cards, high transaction volumes, embedded finance use cases. What are the threats that require the most attention?
Sven: The key is adaptability and maintaining a constant feedback loop on the effectiveness of controls. Speed, volume, value, and transparency – or the absence of it – are the universal risk factors, regardless of the specific ecosystem in which funds move. Criminals seek out the most efficient channels; those with more robust controls are less attractive targets. The focus should always be on root causes, not just surface symptoms.
Interviewer: What does good financial crime intelligence actually look like in practice – how do you separate signal from noise?
Sven: Outcome-based measurement has a role, but different financial crime disciplines operate on different timescales, and some risk materialisation may be missed if you rely on it alone. The critical element is contextual understanding – making sense of the noise, not just filtering it out. Equally important is the collective intelligence that comes from information sharing across the financial sector and from the feedback provided by national Financial Intelligence Units and supervisory authorities. No organisation can do this effectively in isolation.
Interviewer: What’s the biggest misconception people have about AML and financial crime prevention?
Sven: That it is purely a compliance exercise – a checklist driven by the letter of regulation. In reality, effective anti-financial crime work is principle-based. The intent of the regulation matters more than the detail of any specific rule. Controls must be calibrated to the actual risk profile of the organisation, not applied uniformly because a rulebook says so. When that distinction is understood, the work generates genuine value – for the institution, for customers, and for society.
Interviewer: After a career spent looking for what people are hiding, how do you switch off?
Sven: Honestly, I find the field absorbing enough that a complete switch-off is rarely necessary. But good company – family and friends – goes a long way. As does a well-chosen book and the reliable mood-lift of physical exercise.
