GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

As tech­nol­o­gy con­tin­ues to evolve, so too have crim­i­nals been chang­ing their tech­niques and there­fore, fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions need to be ever vig­i­lant and en­sure there is prop­er com­pli­ance in place, says Joseph Re­my, pres­i­dent of Co­op­er­a­tive Cred­it Union League.

Re­my was speak­ing at the fourth an­nu­al com­pli­ance of­fi­cers’ con­fer­ence of the Co­op­er­a­tive Cred­it Union League which was held vir­tu­al­ly yes­ter­day.

“We are re­al­is­ing now that the crim­i­nal el­e­ment is very in­no­v­a­tive. They are us­ing every pos­si­ble av­enue in the realm of digi­ti­sa­tion to bring for­ward their il­lic­it trade. In the cred­it union move­ment, we have to en­sure we pro­tect mem­bers’ funds and that we al­so pro­tect the im­age of this no­ble peo­ple-cen­tred move­ment from any pro­lif­er­a­tion of crim­i­nal el­e­ment,” Re­my said.

He added such mea­sures of pro­tec­tion have be­come nec­es­sary in T&T “now more than ever” as he ref­er­enced the re­cent seizure of “ghost firearms” cre­at­ed util­is­ing 3D print­ing tech­nol­o­gy.

The dis­cov­ery was made fol­low­ing a raid at a house in Ca­paro about two weeks ago.

Ghost guns are firearms that can be pro­duced us­ing read­i­ly avail­able 3D tech­nol­o­gy, mak­ing it chal­leng­ing for tra­di­tion­al firearm-con­trol mea­sures to de­tect and pre­vent their ­pro­duc­tion.

Ac­cord­ing to Re­my, for such trade to take place, it has to be fund­ed in the first in­stance.

“We want to en­sure that the cred­it unions are not the av­enues for such fund­ing,” he ad­vised, adding that they need to en­sure that the right com­pli­ance meth­ods are im­ple­ment­ed.

“These are dan­ger­ous times we are liv­ing in and we have to face the re­al­i­ty,” Re­my added.

He fur­ther stat­ed that the more cred­it unions ad­vance them­selves in the pub­lic space, and the more they gain na­tion­al recog­ni­tion, the bet­ter this will be to safe­guard mem­bers and by ex­ten­sion the wider so­ci­ety.