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Adtalem (ATGE) Revamps AFC Compliance Professional Program

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Adtalem Global Education Inc. (ATGE - Free Report) has been undertaking various initiatives to strengthen institutional safeguards against illicit finance. To that end, ACAMS — part of Adtalem — has launched a revised advanced certification program for anti-financial crime (AFC) to train and test applicants on audit and corporate governance skills and principles, including related management actions as well as fieldwork.

The revised certification program is customized for AFC compliance professionals having at least five-year experience as an internal or third-party auditor, bank examiner, audit team supervisor, regulatory trainer, first-line assurance assessor, second-line compliance monitoring and testing staff member or others in similar roles. The Advanced CAMS-Audit certification will help students learn audit best practices. This will include data collection, validation of weaknesses of compliance controls, review of risk assessments and regulatory findings, evaluation of policies and procedures as well as assessment of business operations and regulatory requirements, among other duties.

“Industry demand for highly-skilled internal and external AFC auditors is only set to grow as regulators and watchdog groups like the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) call on senior management to exercise more oversight on their  institutions’ efforts  to clamp down on illicit financial flows,” said ACAMS president and managing director, Scott Liles.

The revised advanced AFC certification program follows the U.S. Anti-Money Laundering Act (AMLA) — passed in January — and U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) — announced in September 2020. The AMLA and FinCEN intend to propose a new rule that requires banks and other institutions to adopt “effective and reasonably designed” AML controls.

The new program will better serve enterprises looking to strengthen, and streamline their international AML audit programs through digitization of the program and retaining the content of the original program. This will help students, who required to have previously passed the organization’s CAMS exam, with online self-study or take part in a 12-hour, instructor-led online training program prior to the examination. Earlier, the certification program required applicants to attend a three-day training program in person, and research and write a white paper in lieu of taking a test.

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The revamped audit program is one of the three advanced specialist-level certification offered by ACAMS and the eighth certification available to compliance professionals.

Initiatives to Drive Performance

Adtalem has been gaining from various strategic initiatives. The company keeps on introducing new degree programs and campuses in order to better serve students. It ensures a balanced focus on investment initiatives to deliver direct returns to shareholders.

For fiscal 2021, Financial Services revenues increased 17.8% year over year driven by a rise in revenues at ACAMS, OnCourse Learning and Becker. ACAMS revenues rose as non-conference certification offerings continue to perform well and conference revenues tend to recover.

Coming to price performance, shares of the company have gained 8.5% so far this year against the industry’s 64.6% decline. The above-mentioned initiatives and the recent move will further aid its share price performance as well as profitability going forward.

Zacks Rank

Adtalem — which shares space with Strategic Education, Inc. (STRA - Free Report) , American Public Education, Inc. (APEI - Free Report) and Universal Technical Institute, Inc. (UTI - Free Report) in the same industry — currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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