Adjoa has worked in the AML, Sanctions and departments for a range of banks from Barclays and HSBC to UBS and Citi. Throughout her career, she has held various senior positions including Associate Director in Financial Crime Compliance at Exiger Ltd, Compliance Manager at HSBC Bank and as Head of Global Training and Communications for Chief Controls Office (CCO) at Barclays Bank Plc, to name a few. She has been promoted and re-hired by several banks due to her outstanding knowledge and expertise in AML, counter-terrorist financing, financial crime, sanctions and anti-bribery and corruption and has won awards for her valuable contribution.

Some of her work included conducting investigations into sanction breaches and circumventions, using her thorough knowledge of internal policy and regulations to make risk-based decisions on whether a sanction has been breached or not. In terms of AML, Adjoa has investigated suspicious activities for intermediary banks, liaising with both remitting banks and beneficiary banks to understand the nature of the transactions being made. Adjoa has also conducted in-depth due diligence with discreet and confidential inquiries and has led reviews projects on high-risk clients, including some high profile cases. Most notably, Adjoa was part of the Global Investigations Team where she headed the Panama Papers Project – a high profile and intricate investigation linked to investigating the exposure of the offshore finance industry across various lines of business at Barclays and provided solutions to ensure the bank had sufficient controls in place to mitigate any such risk in the future. She subsequently reviewed the AML and KYC controls within Barclays and provided solutions in order to mitigate the risks of tax evasion, money laundering and sanction breaches, which were implemented via policy changes.

In 2011 as Assistant Manager at KPMG UK, she instituted and led an innovative project that tracked current financial crime regulations, shared the knowledge and escalated the changes and its impact to the wider firm and clients. Her leadership grew the Forensic Team and she went on to lead the Forensic Team within the UK and India on the initiative. In that same year, on her secondment to Barclays, Adjoa fostered a deeper client relationship between KPMG and Barclays through weekly regulatory updates and implications for the sanctions department. This resulted in higher work output for KPMG from Barclays.