Opening remarks from Outlier Compliance Group Co-Founder and Chairperson Amber D. Scott at TCAE 2025 Toronto Compliance & AML Conference
Many of us remember exactly where we were on this day 24 years ago.
Imagine this scenario: I was a new compliance analyst at Manulife, having started my first role after university just a month before in the Waterloo head office. I had been at my desk since 7 am when a colleague, her face streaked with tears, came by to tell our team to assemble for instructions in one of the conference rooms. There was little information, but what was known was devastating; America was under attack, on home soil.
Financial markets closed. Staff were sent home to await further instructions. When I went to my desk to pick up my handbag, my phone was ringing and I answered. It was a colleague in Toronto with mobility issues, who was not able to navigate the crowds at Union Station. So she had gone back to the office, which was now mostly empty, to wait, and she was terrified. We talked for two hours, until some of the crowds cleared.
While we were on the phone, my colleague and I would set our physical handset phones aside, and walk over to nearby meeting rooms to see if there were any updates on the news on the TVs there. It was 2001 – we couldn’t just Google it.
So much has changed since then. I think it’s fair to say that at the time, the idea of compliance was academically interesting, but if you asked me what I did – or why it mattered – neither money laundering, nor counter terrorism would have been top of mind.
But some things strike me as being eerily similar – we talked to each other that day about what was happening and what it meant. In the days that followed, the most common question asked was what can we do to help? In the months and years that followed, how do we make sure that this doesn’t happen again? We refused to be paralyzed by fear, and sought to build more resilient systems, even if these were sometimes inconvenient.
Today, while I have many more sources of information at my fingertips, I am still very reliant on people in my network when I need to understand something at a deep level. While I don’t have to put down a handset and go to the meeting room next door to see what’s on the news, I am every bit as reliant on colleagues and contacts to parse information, understand implications, and find truth.
Finding truth, in my estimation, is one of the greatest challenges of the modern era. The importance of truth cannot be overstated at a time when we are under continuous attack, pummeled with misinformation and disinformation, on a seemingly unending basis, from every possible direction, via every possible channel. On that score, I owe a huge debt to some of the folks in the room today, who have been unerring sources of insight, and of truth.
This is not an indictment of my own skills or abilities, but a call to the importance of communities, and knowledge sharing. Any one of us can be strong on our own, but no one can achieve a true level of badassery without community.
It is fitting then, that I am standing on this stage today with Souzan Ismaili, because no one builds community better than she does. Souzan is tireless in her quest to bring people together, to educate, and to create connections.
I don’t think that the importance of this work can be understated – but this is not just Souzan’s work. This is a call to action to every person here today, to build community, to find your sources of truth, and to be that Northstar for your colleagues when you can. It won’t always be easy, in fact, sometimes it will be hard – but we will always be stronger together.
