The Goal
The Wolfsberg Group is an anonymous cohort of professionals at the world’s largest banks. They publish guidelines for combatting financial crime that have become the global benchmark for Anti-Money Laundering and Know Your Customer policy. When they update their guidelines, the industry pays attention.
We designed this piece to cover their new guidance on Monitoring for Suspicious Activity (MSA), a holistic approach that combines practices across the AFC function. It was a genuine paradigm shift, and for Hawk, it was a chance to explain what the shift meant and show that Hawk was already ahead of it.
The Plan
We wanted to meet practitioners where the conversation was already happening. We would do this by adding substance—not just summarizing—and use it to position Hawk as a product that employs a modern AFC approach. We would publish this content ungated, because the goal was reach and credibility, not lead capture.
The Process
Our Chief Product Officer had deep expertise in entity resolution and had worked in anti-financial crime at a major bank. Rather than ask him to write a draft, I ran a structured Q&A interview and ghostwrote the piece. This meant cleaner raw material, less work for the SME, and the ability to craft the narrative arc from the start. Everyone wins. Everyone except our competitors who didn’t publish anything.
The Results
We quickly and successfully published the white paper and syndicated it to the Hawk blog for dual-channel distribution. It saw strong SEO traffic and solid traction with the AML community—the right people found it through organic search, which is exactly what a brand play like this is designed to produce.
The Learnings
- The interview-to-ghostwrite workflow beats “send me a draft” every time. A structured interview produces cleaner material, respects the SME’s time, and lets you build the narrative yourself rather than untangle someone else’s stream of consciousness.
- Credibility in niche B2B content comes from specificity, not polish. The AFC audience can smell a vague summary from three paragraphs away (they really stink). Demonstrating genuine domain fluency earns their trust.
- Dual distribution is a no-brainer with content like this. You do zero additional production work and get double the result. Plus, a PDF is much more shareable than a link to a blog.
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