Juan C. Zarate

The Honorable Juan Zarate is global co-managing partner and chief strategy officer at K2 Integrity.

Juan provides expert counsel and strategic guidance to clients on complex internal and international financial investigations; manages multidisciplinary teams advising on global anti-money laundering (AML) and sanctions compliance remediation; and oversees financial-integrity-related reforms for public and private institutions.

Juan has advised on the most challenging AML and financial integrity enforcement issues facing the private sector, working with key financial intelligence units, regulators, finance ministries, prosecutors, and law enforcement agencies around the world. He has also led some of the largest asset recovery ventures in history, including the return of more than $3 billion in Iraqi assets.

Juan is also the chair and co-founder of Consilient, a newly launched company dedicated to establishing the next-generation AML/CFT system through the application of revolutionary technologies.

Prior to K2 Integrity, Juan served as the deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism (“counterterrorism czar”), where he was responsible for developing and implementing the U.S. counterterrorism strategy and policies related to transnational security threats, including anti-money laundering, kleptocracy, and transnational organized crime. He was the first-ever assistant secretary of the treasury for terrorist financing and financial crimes. In this role, he led the post-9/11 anti-money laundering and sanctions regime expansion in the United States; helped develop the international standards for AML/CFT and proliferation finance; supervised the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), and the Treasury’s Executive Office for Asset Forfeiture (TEOAF); and drove the innovative use of the Treasury’s national-security-related powers and ultimately the establishment of the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (TFI). Prior to 9/11, Juan served as federal terrorism prosecutor, working on international terrorism cases like the bombings of the U.S. embassies in East Africa and the USS Cole.

For more than five years, Juan sat on the board of the Vatican’s Financial Information Authority (appointed twice by Pope Francis as the U.S. representative to oversee the Vatican’s AML reforms). For seven years, he was the U.S. advisor on HSBC’s Financial System Vulnerabilities Committee (overseeing remediation of the bank’s AML system and adherence with the U.S. DOJ deferred prosecution agreement). He sits on the boards of various organizations, including Northwestern Mutual, Boston Dynamics, Cambridge Quantum Computing (North America), and the Director’s Advisory Board for the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC).

Juan is the chair of the Center on Economic and Financial Power at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and an independent advisor to Coinbase. He was a visiting lecturer in law at the Harvard Law School for eight years and is a published author, including the books Treasury’s War (2013) and Forging Democracy (1994).

Juan is a cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School and a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, where he received the John P. Reardon award as the top scholar-athlete.