About Drew Davidson
BSA Officer and Head of Financial Crime ยท Saint Louis, Missouri
A decade of compliance leadership across fintech, payments, and crypto, with a bias toward infrastructure that compliance teams can own and operate.
Compliance leadership across fintech, payments, and crypto. Built the early compliance operations at Square, led global transaction monitoring at Block across Square seller, Cash App, international corridors, and the Bitcoin launch, ran compliance product at Mercury through the SVB-driven hypergrowth, owned payments financial crime strategy at network scale at Discover, and stood up a full BSA/AML, OFAC, fraud, and KYC/KYB program from the ground up as named BSA Officer at an early-stage payments fintech under a sponsor bank model.
The bias is toward infrastructure. Programs that scale, controls that hold up under examination, and systems compliance teams can operate without external dependency. Named inventor on filed patents for transaction monitoring.
Drew is CAMS certified, the Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist credential from the Association of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists. He studied criminology at Missouri State University.
He serves on the board of the Greater St. Louis ACAMS chapter as Co-Membership Director, leading programming, membership development, CAMS promotion, and mentorship for the regional compliance and AML community.
BSA/AML program architecture
Risk assessment, policy, procedures, and program design that survives examination.
Transaction monitoring
Typology design, model governance, rule tuning, alert quality, and SAR pipeline.
KYC/KYB lifecycle
Onboarding, identity verification, ongoing CDD and EDD, beneficial-owner workflows, and re-decisioning.
Sponsor bank oversight
Bank and fintech program management, ISO and ISV governance, reporting cadence, and partner readiness.
Sanctions and OFAC
OFAC, UN, EU, and UK HMT screening, list management, counterparty risk, and cross-border exposure.
Payment network compliance
Card networks, ACH, FedNow, RTP, PayFac obligations, and sub-merchant risk.
Crypto and digital assets
Bitcoin and stablecoin flows, blockchain analytics, on and off ramp screening, and Travel Rule posture.
Regulatory examination
FFIEC, FinCEN, and state DFS examinations, bank partner reviews, remediation plans, and consent order navigation.
Ranger is a compliance workbench covering transaction monitoring, case management, SAR pipeline, sanctions screening, and KYC/KYB lifecycle on a multi-tenant architecture. Forrest Fintech Consulting is the advisory vehicle for fintechs, sponsor banks, and payment platforms that want compliance infrastructure they actually own.