I learned a lot about money laundering and cybercrime on my last portrait assignment.
“The scope is so large now,” my subject told me. “It’s a tougher market. It’s more exciting. It’s constantly evolving.”
And Oliver Wood hopes to be a part of a force that stops it.
Oliver, 23, is a recent graduate of Clemson University’s business school, and hired me to give him some head-shots for his resume. His degree is in finance management, a field that remains as button-down boring as you want to make it — but as he pointed out to me, one side of that industry is evolving into something feral. Oliver aspires to help not just clients, but whole countries in the battle against the trillion-dollar money-laundering underground.
“You’re dealing with different cultures,” he told me. “It’s an opportunity to become more involved with other places.”
Oliver grew up competitive: as a high school tennis player, he contributed to four Illinois championship teams. He also grew up comfortable with pursuits that do not fascinate the general public — he helped create a table-tennis team at his high school.
“It’s always a conversation-starter,” he said.
And while money fascinates everyone, Oliver laments that so many people have so little interest in learning how to protect and multiply it. There are no profound complexities to the basics of financial management, he said:
• Savings accounts are crucial, and the younger you set one up for your kids, the more likely they become to live as financially responsible adults.
• Keep your receipts and watch your expenses, then set a budget to determine where your money should go instead where it just happens to end up going. The worst excuse, he said, is to tell yourself that you don’t need a budget because you don’t make enough money.
“I think it should be taught more in schools,” he said. “You should go through life with a financial perspective.”
Of course, there are a multitude of financial perspectives for any individual to take, including the shady and the criminal. So many computers hold so many debit card numbers, credit card numbers, Social Security numbers and on and on — and that says nothing about the illicit movement of old-fashioned paper money. Multi-national plots have never been harder to foil, he says.
