In this episode, Tom Fox welcomes Matt Friedman, founder and CEO of The Mekong Club, to discuss his book “Awakening the Advocate,” which explains his career in the fight against human trafficking.
Matt tells his journey through survivor/NGO stories, traces his personal journey from a shy child in Connecticut to 35 years of anti-slavery work across 35+ countries, and shows that ordinary people can become advocates. He assesses progress as limited relative to the scale of the problem (50 million in modern slavery; 110,000 helped; 6,000 convictions; $236B in profits vs. $400M, now $250M, to fight it), arguing that awareness is the main gap. He outlines how companies, especially banks, can start internally via leadership briefings, policies, awareness, targeted training, red flags, procurement review, and baseline assessments, linking efforts to ESG, business value, and reputational/regulatory risk. Matt also discusses AI’s emerging role in detecting patterns across supply chains and transactions and emphasizes individual actions, pro bono support, and the importance of compliance work.
For more information on the use of AI in compliance programs, Tom Fox’s new book, Upping Your Game, is available. You can purchase a copy of the book on Amazon.com.
To learn about the intersection of Sherlock Holmes and the modern compliance professional, check out Tom’s latest book, The Game is Afoot-What Sherlock Holmes Teaches About Risk, Ethics and Investigations on Amazon.com.
As a former US and United Nations diplomat, Matthew Friedman has been a true warrior on the frontlines against modern slavery and sex trafficking for over four decades. He is an international human trafficking expert and the CEO of The Mekong Club, a non-governmental organization comprised of Hong Kong’s leading businesses that have joined forces to help end all forms of modern slavery.
The Mekong Club is very active in the ESG space and is well-versed in identifying red flags and appropriate metrics to gauge anti-human trafficking compliance.
Previously, he worked for the United States Agency for International Development and the UN in over 40 countries. Matt offers technical advice to numerous governments, banks, and corporations working to eliminate all forms of modern slavery and authorizes fifteen books. In 2017, he won Asia’s prestigious “Communicator of the Year” Gold Award.
His postings have taken him all over Asia, from Nepal to Bangladesh and Thailand. The Mekong Club works with private sector banks, manufacturers, retailers, and the hospitality sectors to do what they need to do in the fight against human trafficking and slavery.
The topic of modern slavery – more colloquially referred to as human trafficking – is a bleak one. In this episode of Regulatory Ramblings, Matt chats with host Ajay Shamdasani about what the global banking and financial institutions and multinational corporations can do about the matter.
The problem indirectly affects us all: estimates are that 50 million people in the world are currently in some form of slavery. Twenty-seven million of them are engaged in forced labor, of which 82% of this figure is associated with supply chains.
Though many survivors of human slavery put on a brave face and try to go about their lives as best they can, it is debatable whether or not they can truly ever be made whole.
The conversation begins with Matt sharing his background and what drew him to the cause of modern slavery. He also stresses that despite the Mekong Club being an NGO, it works with the private sector, perhaps more so than with other NGOs or state bodies. As he notes, there is a greater impetus to take action to effect change in the private sector than in the public sector.
Working with the private sector is an approach that has served Matt and the Club well because, as he puts it: “The private sector has a sense of urgency, unlike the public sector. If a company does an audit on human trafficking and there is a problem, within fifteen minutes, they will call a meeting of all the relevant stakeholders and work to remediate it. The private sector does more than traditional NGOs because they are closer to the action,” he said. He added that NGOs tended to intellectualize matters, often reducing them to purely academic or legal concerns.
Reflecting on his four decades in the field, Matt also recounts what has changed about human trafficking and what has remained the same. As he points out, the evolution of human trafficking is interesting, going from forced manual labor to compelling enslaved persons to undertake more elaborate crimes such as scam farms and ‘pig butchering’ schemes.
The discussion concludes with Matt sharing his views on how the financial sector can protect themselves from becoming unwitting participants in human trafficking and the sex trade. There is an intersection between money laundering, financial crime, and human trafficking, he says, and it is something the UN Counter-Trafficking program was created to combat.
The Regulatory Ramblings podcasts are brought to you by the University of Hong Kong—Reg/Tech Lab, HKU-SCF Fintech Academy, Asia Global Institute, and HKU-edX Professional Certificate in Fintech, with support from the HKU Faculty of Law.
