Katherine (Kate) Bauer is a managing director in K2 Integrity’s Financial Crimes Compliance practice. With more than 15 years of experience in public policy, national security, and financial sector development across government, academia, and the private sector, Kate works with FinTech firms, financial institutions, and jurisdictional authorities to improve their financial crimes and sanctions compliance by mitigating risks associated with money laundering, terrorist financing, sanctions evasion, and other forms of illicit financial activity.
Prior to joining K2 Integrity, Kate worked on public policy in Meta’s (Facebook) Financial Technologies division, managing the company’s public policy strategy for payments and digital assets in North America. She was responsible for digital asset and financial crime risk comment letters at the state and federal levels and coordinated with industry groups and international organizations such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). She also advised Meta’s business and product teams on regulatory trends and partnership risks and contributed to global strategy related to innovation in financial services.
Before her time at Meta, Kate was a senior fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where she wrote, lectured, and consulted on international sanctions, regional assistance, and investment flows. She testified before Congress on illicit finance topics, including multilateral sanctions, terrorist financing trends, and AML/CFT cooperation with the Gulf States, and taught a graduate-level course on combatting the financing of transnational threats at Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service.
Earlier in her career, Kate spent over a decade in the U.S. government, including in key roles at the Treasury Department and as a graduate fellow in the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. While at Treasury, she served as financial attaché for the Gulf, based at the U.S. Embassy in Abu Dhabi, and as the inaugural financial attaché at the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem. She was also an assistant director in the Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes, developing and implementing U.S. counter-illicit financing policy in the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America. Kate began her career at Treasury as an analyst in the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, conducting all-source analysis of illicit financial networks. She led the U.S. delegation to the Middle East and North Africa Financial Action Task Force (MENA FATF) and received recognition for her outstanding public service, including the Treasury Secretary’s Honor Award and multiple State Department Meritorious Honor Awards.
Kate earned her M.A. in Middle East studies and international economics from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and her B.A. in history and international studies from Macalester College. She has a working proficiency in French and is conversational in Arabic.
