Holly Avent

Consultant

Holly Avent, Consultant

Holly lives in North London, is married to Jack, has a young daughter and a black labrador (slightly chunky according to the vet but we won’t tell him don’t worry) called Duncan. She has quite a competitive edge and enjoys watching and playing most sports. When she’s not reading the Hungry Caterpillar, you’ll find her exploring European cities and enjoying delicious food and wine.

Meet Holly

Holly has over 10 years’ experience having worked at the FCA and as a Consultant. Holly is very personable and builds great rapport with clients quickly. She explains her findings and recommendations in a clear and concise manner and will always come back to not only what has to be done, but why.

Experience:

  • Holly worked within the Financial Crime Supervision Team at the FCA. Here she performed numerous Proactive AML Programme (PAMLP) visits. This has given her great insight into how the FCA operates and what they expect to see from firms. Whilst at the FCA she also oversaw other regulatory tools including voluntary requirements and attestations. She was the financial crime expert during competency-based interviews, assessing potential SMF17 individuals. 

  • Holly has extensive knowledge of issuing, conducting and reviewing financial crime s166 projects. She has undertaken numerous s166 reviews since coming back from maternity leave, leading on workstreams including Governance and Customer. This process involves requesting key documents, interviewing staff across the three lines of defence, conducting walkthroughs and file / alerts testing. Gained over many years’ experience, she knows how to run these workstreams to be efficient and informative.

  • Holly undertook a secondment to review and uplift financial crime systems and controls for a leading UK based challenger bank. This touched on most of the financial crime framework, including re-designing the Business Wide Risk Assessment, drafting the MLRO report and reviewing and uplifting the firms’ Transaction Monitoring controls. These sub-projects were all successfully delivered within challenging timescales.