The Goal
Build Hawk’s brand with the AML community and extend the reach of the Wolfsberg MSA white paper beyond the PDF. Infographics gave us something the white paper couldn’t: one-click, shareable content that could stand alone on social or pull double duty inside the paper itself.
The Plan
Four graphics, each illustrating a key dimension of the paradigm shift at the heart of the Wolfsberg Group’s MSA guidance: Transaction Monitoring vs. Monitoring for Suspicious Activity, Monitoring Then vs. Monitoring Now, Ineffective MSA vs. Effective MSA, and Parallel Processing vs. Sandbox Testing. Simple comparisons. Big conceptual lift. The goal was to make each one useful on its own and stronger as a set.
The Process
Working with the same CPO who co-authored the white paper, I took the core concepts and figured out how to strip each one down to its visual essence. Complex AFC frameworks don’t naturally lend themselves to clean graphics — the challenge was finding the right level of abstraction. Too simple and you lose the point. Too detailed and you’ve just made a slide nobody wants to look at.
I produced some of the graphics myself and briefed a designer to handle the rest. The brief had to be tight enough that the designer could work independently without a background in financial crime compliance. (Spoiler: they pulled it off.)
The Results
The infographics ran in the white paper, on the Hawk blog, and across social channels — three placements, one production effort. No hard social metrics on this one, but the content did exactly what it was designed to do: made a dense topic approachable and gave the audience something worth sharing.
The Learnings
- Infographics are a force multiplier, not a standalone play. Their value compounds when they’re built to work across formats — embedded in a white paper, dropped into a blog post, shared as social assets. Design once, deploy everywhere.
- Briefing a designer on technical content requires translation work upfront. The more esoteric the subject matter, the more important it is to give the designer conceptual clarity before they touch a single pixel. A vague brief produces generic output. A precise brief produces something that actually communicates.
- The right level of simplification is harder to find than it looks. Reducing a complex framework to a clean visual without losing what makes it meaningful is genuinely difficult. It requires understanding the concept well enough to know which details are essential and which are noise.
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