Esmé Bosma is a PhD Candidate at the Political Science department of the University of Amsterdam. She holds a bachelor and master degree in Political Science in which she specialised in European security politics. Her PhD project is situated at the intersection of Science-and-Technology Studies (STS) and Critical Security Studies (CSS) and analyses the way in which banks and financial institutions counter terrorism financing and the use of technology in this context. By doing ethnographic fieldwork in banks and the financial sector she studies how private actors absorb an increasing amount of security responsibilities and what kind of (ethical and practical) dilemmas arise in doing so.
Esmé Bosma is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Political Science the University of Amsterdam. She holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Political Science in which she specialised in European security politics. Her PhD project is situated at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and (critical) security studies. She studies how private actors absorb an increasing amount of security responsibilities and what kind of ethical, technical and practical dilemmas arise in doing so. By doing ethnographic fieldwork in banks and the financial sector she studies how European banks and financial institutions counter terrorism financing in practice.
Being gatekeepers of the financial system, banks have the legal obligation to ‘know their customers’ before offering their services and to report unusual or suspicious transactions to Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs). In her research she analyses how financial institutions translate these regulatory requirements into practical processes and protocols. She studies how banks do customer research, monitor transactions and how they engage in public-private partnerships to counter terrorism financing. In this context she studies how the emergence of FinTechs may impact the security responsibilities of banks. What are the possibilities and challenges of using data science and Artificial Intelligence in detecting, monitoring and reporting financial economic crime? The project provides context to the ways in which private actors weigh the complex and sometimes competing responsibilities of their security, commercial and societal roles.