CAMS Readiness: Anti-Money-Laundering Judgment for the Specialist Credential
Signature Course No. 407 — A Signature AI Socratic Coaching Course.
No experience needed — your coach starts where you are.
A New Kind of Learning
Socratic coaching, delivered by an agentic AI coach.
Not a course you watch. An AI coach you work with.
The Lighthouse Coach begins by discovering how you think about the subject, teaches what is missing, and gives you realistic practice before asking you to prove that you can use it. You may test out of concepts you already understand, while capstones turn the learning into a practical plan, decision, conversation, or other real-world result.
The curriculum is deliberately authored; the AI delivers it through coaching. It is not an AI randomly generating lessons.
A coach that teaches by asking — not by lecturing
The Lighthouse Coach is an AI Socratic coach built on Cognosco Learning's CAMS Readiness: Anti-Money-Laundering Judgment for the Specialist Credential course, in the Risk, Safety & Compliance category. It does not play videos at you. It holds a conversation: it asks you a question, listens to your answer, names the misconception it hears, affirms what you got right, and asks the next question — the way a great coach works in the room.
Dirty money has to go somewhere — and so does the money that funds violence. Between the crime and the spending of its proceeds stands the financial system, and inside it a specialist whose job is judgment: this customer, this pattern, this explanation, this document — does it hold together, or does it not, and what do you do next, and how do you write it so a reviewer, an examiner, or a law-enforcement reader can follow your reasoning years later?
It starts with the three moves. Placement, layering, integration — the classic model of how criminal value is made usable — taught exactly, then corrected the way a specialist must: the stages blur, overlap, and sometimes vanish, so you learn to follow value, not form, and to read the cost and trace every move leaves. A deposit is not suspicious because it is large, and a wire is not clean because it is electronic.
It works in two movements. First, Module 1 — Risks, Methods, and the Regime — work through Concepts 1–9, finishing with The Risk and Regime Brief; then, Module 2 — Inside the Program, and the Case — work through Concepts 10–18, finishing with The Investigation and Filing Decision File.
Both capstones produce real artifacts — a specialist's risk and regime brief on a complex prospective relationship group of three related import companies under common family control; and an investigation and filing decision file on a live, linked case: an established importer, its owner's personal account, and two newly opened family accounts, worked from alert cluster to closed file.
The honesty standard is part of the course. This course promises readiness, never a result: it prepares you for the published CAMS examination blueprint and for the case work the credential stands for, and it does not promise that you will pass an examination or satisfy an examiner. Sanctions lists, thresholds, and filing mechanics change, so the regime is taught at structure level — the durable architecture — with every current specific flagged to verify against the current source. And the boundary is absolute: this course certifies the specialist's judgment; it does not build the institution's program. It is information about a framework, not legal advice.
The course is self-paced and always on — roughly 30 minutes per concept, about 9 hours in full, taken in as many sittings as you like. You can type your answers, or talk out loud: the Voice Coach speaks its questions and listens to your spoken replies. Learners who already know the material can test out concept by concept.
CAMS Readiness: Anti-Money-Laundering Judgment for the Specialist Credential is part of The Lighthouse Signature Series — the online counterpart to the one-day, in-person learning Cognosco Learning has delivered since 2002.
Course Facts
One full concept, coached end to end — free: verify your email and we’ll send you a link to start.
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Diagnose → Learn & Practice → Prove → Capstone
Every learner moves through the same discipline a Cognosco instructor would insist on in the room.
Diagnose
The Coach starts where the course starts: with a business you know well. If its owner wanted to introduce outside cash into its books, where exactly would the entry point be, and what record would that entry create? Why would a customer move funds through four accounts in two days and end where he started, minus fees? And in your own institution's products — deposits, wires, trade, lending, private accounts — where would each of the three moves be easiest to attempt? Every concept opens with three questions that locate where you actually stand, and your answers shape how deeply the Coach works the concept with you. Everyone begins with Module 1 — no skipping the foundations you only think you have.
Learn & Practice
Work each concept in conversation with the Coach — spoken or written — then practice it against realistic situations until it holds up.
Prove
Every concept ends in proof: answer the check cold and demonstrate the skill. Know it already? Test out and take credit immediately.
Capstone
Finish with two capstones — The Risk and Regime Brief for Module 1 and The Investigation and Filing Decision File for Module 2 — that pull the whole course together, and earn the certificate.
What You'll Learn
You cannot recognize what you cannot picture. Definitions do not catch laundering; pictures do — a working picture of how value is hidden, moved, and made spendable, and of the rules architecture that tells the specialist what must be known about a customer, what must be watched, what must be reported, and what must never be touched at all.
Module 1 builds the ground the specialist stands on. Money laundering in three moves and the different risk logic of terrorism and proliferation financing; the typology families — trade, cash, and structuring, then digital, professional, and network methods; the international architecture, the United States regime, and sanctions; and the two great reading skills of the trade: assessing risk — inherent, control, and residual — and knowing the customer, ownership resolved to natural persons.
Module 2 moves inside the program and onto the case. The program from inside and where your seat sits in it; monitoring and triage; red flags read against an expected profile; the investigation built, documented, and decided; SAR craft — the narrative and the duties around it; the correspondent, private, and high-risk lines; the technology your judgment travels through; and the specialist's standard, held when the business, the customer, or the clock pushes the other way.
And it holds its boundary throughout. One institution, one seat: every case in this course is worked from the same seat inside Sorinvale Bank, a fictional regional bank, because real judgment is the art of reading one institution's facts until they answer. The institution's program, designed whole, belongs to a sibling course; this course assumes you are the person awareness-level concerns get escalated to — and builds the judgment that seat demands.
What you will learn
- Explain how money laundering, terrorism financing, and proliferation financing work, and distinguish their different risk logics
- Recognize the major typologies — trade-based, cash-based, digital, professional, and network methods — and state the red-flag logic each one leaves behind
- Describe the international standards architecture and the United States BSA/AML and sanctions regimes at structure level, and verify current specifics against current sources
- Read an enterprise risk assessment and a customer risk rating, and judge inherent risk, control strength, and residual risk from the specialist's seat
- Apply customer due diligence, beneficial ownership, and enhanced due diligence judgment to complex and high-risk relationships
- Triage monitoring alerts, read activity against an expected profile, and separate the explainable from the escalable
- Build an investigation: timeline, sources, documentation, disposition, and a suspicious activity narrative a reader can use
- Hold the specialist's standard — confidentiality, escalation, and professional conduct — under business and time pressure
Everything in the course
- All 18 concepts of CAMS Readiness: Anti-Money-Laundering Judgment for the Specialist Credential, in 2 modules
- A starting-point check first — the Coach finds where you actually stand before teaching
- Learn, Practice, Prove for every concept — no passive video watching
- A test-out on every concept: prove you know it and move on
- The Voice Coach: talk with the Coach out loud — it speaks, listens, and replies
- A personal Learner Record of your work across the course
- Two capstone exercises: The Risk and Regime Brief and The Investigation and Filing Decision File
- A printable session summary whenever you pause
- The Lighthouse Coach completion certificate (Signature Series)
- Your progress is saved as you go — stop anytime, resume where you left off
Built for the seat the case gets escalated to
AML specialists and analysts — in banks, credit unions, money services businesses, broker-dealers, casinos, and fintech firms — who work alerts, cases, and customer reviews and are preparing for the CAMS credential; and BSA and AML officers and their deputies who need specialist depth in their own seat and the judgment to review the work of others.
Investigators and case reviewers — who build files, write narratives, and make filing and exit recommendations that must survive second review; and auditors, examiners, and consultants who assess AML work from outside the case team.
Compliance professionals moving into financial crime work — who hold adjacent credentials and need the AML method, regime, and case craft as a coherent discipline. This course assumes working familiarity with ordinary banking: accounts, transfers, payments, lending, and the difference between a deposit product and a credit product. It does not assume prior case work; the case craft is built here, concept by concept.
Prefer to learn live and in person? The same material anchors Cognosco's one-day programs — browse the in-person catalog.
Start with Money Laundering in Three Moves
$195 — introductory price. One payment. No subscription, no password to manage.
Here is exactly what happens when you enroll:
- Pay securely with Stripe — you are taken straight into the course
- Create your learner profile and begin the Module 1 starting-point check
- Save the access key you are given — it restores your enrollment on any device
- Learn at your pace; your progress is stored in your browser on your device
For the full voice experience, use Chrome and allow the microphone when asked. Typing your answers works everywhere, all the time. Questions before you enroll? Email hello@cognoscolearning.com.
Before you enroll
What is a Socratic coaching session?
A conversation, not a video. Your coach asks a question; you answer — out loud by voice, or by typing — and the coach responds to what you said: naming the misconception it hears, affirming what you got right, and asking the next question. You advance only when you have mastered each concept, so a finished course means the learning held.
How long does it take — and how long do I have?
About 30 minutes per concept. Learn in sittings of any length; your progress is saved as you go. You have a full year from purchase to finish, and you can revisit and retake within that year.
What does the certificate verify?
That you completed every concept and both capstones of this course. Anyone can confirm a Cognosco certificate online — enter its certificate ID on our verification page.
What if it isn't for me — what are the refunds?
If you have not started, cancel for a full refund within seven days of purchase. Once you have started, there is no cash refund — stop before finishing and we credit the full amount you paid toward any other course in the library (credit valid one year from your original purchase). Once you complete the course, no refund or credit applies.
More Signature Courses are coming
CAMS Readiness: Anti-Money-Laundering Judgment for the Specialist Credential is Signature Course No. 407. Leave your email and we'll send you news of future Signature Courses and Lighthouse updates as they are announced — nothing else.