Sara Elehky is a senior director with the Financial Crimes Compliance practice at K2 Integrity. With a decade of experience in banking—focusing on investigative services and process management guidance—Sara helps financial institution clients ensure they meet financial crime regulations. She works with clients on regulatory consent orders that mandate transaction monitoring lookbacks and provides quality assurance for client lookbacks that include transaction analysis and relevant due diligence inquiries. She also leads and manages client engagements, providing guidance and investigative support.
Prior to joining K2 Integrity, Sara was a governance and policy manager at Scotiabank within its corporate security/legal department, where she developed enterprise-wide policies and procedures for several divisions, including digital forensic investigations, financial crime investigations, intelligence, and protective services. For these corporate security divisions, she conducted quality assurance reviews of investigations and created risk assessment programs and an operational investigative process. Sara worked closely with these divisions and with internal stakeholders such as the privacy, anti-bribery/anti-corruption (AB/AC), anti-money laundering (AML) and sanctions, operational risk management, fraud, and business continuity departments to implement policy and governance frameworks to test and monitor the effectiveness of the firm’s policies, procedures, and operational programs.
Sara also worked within the AML department at Scotiabank, where she worked on system-generated alerts and manual submissions that included correspondent banking, foreign exchange, cash, precious metals, and securities transactions identifying potentially suspicious activity and drafting suspicious transaction reports (STRs). During this time, she worked closely with retail banking operations to train bank employees on the manual submission of unusual transactions, completing KYC procedures, and conducting enhanced due diligence (EDD) on clients. Sara managed a regulatory compliance project with the JPMorgan Chase AML and fraud department for a shared portfolio of department store credit cards.
Sara received an M.S. in jurisprudence (M.S.J.) from Seton Hall University School of Law, with a concentration in financial service compliance, and a B.A. from the University of Toronto with a double major in crime, law, and deviance and industrial relations and a minor in women and gender studies. She is a Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist (CAMS) and a Certified Fraud Examiner (CFE).
