As if to shatter stereotypes I gave an on-line one hour seminar to a group of US anti-money laundering officers and advisers this week, organised by a dynamic senior manager in Deloitte, New York.

Feedback suggest that they enjoyed what I had to say: I enjoyed leading the session. I also massively appreciated the chance to do so without ever leaving my office here in the UK.

The discussion was wide ranging, some of it quite technical (I am still a money laundering officer myself) but the focus was on how the data that TJN has created in its Secrecy Jurisdictions web site (well over 1,000 pages of it) could be used for anti-money laundering risk assessment purposes.

Risk assessment in that sector is in no small part based on available rankings. The OECD rankings play a role for example: so does Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index. What was clear was that because the TJN work was a) rigorous and b) sourced in every case and c) could be aggregated (i.e. a risk score for a structure over a range of jurisdictions could be easily computed) it has considerable potential for use in this sector.

I admit that would probably need the database to be more easily accessible — for which we did not have funding. But it would be great to work with people keen to achieve that. If anyone wants to call, please do.