Eyal Azoulay and Ellie
Subject: Following the Terrorist’s Money
Bio: Founders of the Israeli Not-for-profit ColEven
Following the Terrorist’s Money
What Happens Next in 6 Minutes - 07.20.2026
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and history. Today’s episode is Following the Terrorist’s Money.
Our two speakers are Eyal Azoulay and Ellie who are the founders of an Israeli Not-for-profit called ColEven. Terrorists successfully move money from their Western supporters to the Middle East to fund their nefarious affairs. This happens despite the best efforts of American and European banks who spend billions of dollars trying to stop it.
ColEven uses the latest technologies in coordination with a staff of former Israeli intelligence professionals who inform the banks that bad actors are using their institutions.
I was introduced to Coleven at the Miami Beach Impact Forum. This organization has an annual Jewish charity shark tank event. At the dinner, four different charities explained what they do and then the audience picks charities to support. I was super impressed by Coleven’s mission and accomplishments and donated to them.
Ellie, can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
Ellie:
Coleven is a nonprofit intelligence organization. How do terror organizations move money through the global financial system despite the enormous compliance and regulatory infrastructure designed to stop them? Most people imagine terror financing as suitcases of cash or secret bank accounts. In reality, it is often hidden in plain sight. It can look like a charity fundraising campaign, a nonprofit organization, a small company registered in London, Hong Kong or Delaware, or an online crowdfunding page collecting donations from ordinary people who have no idea where the money is ultimately going.
Our mission at Coleven is to identify hidden financial networks and provide actionable intelligence to financial institutions, regulators, payment providers, and governments to take action.
We are not a government agency, think tank, or an advocacy organization. We are an operational intelligence organization using open-source intelligence, financial analysts, corporate records, and sanctioned data. We are mapping networks, identifying risks that can be used by decision makers.
Banks are consuming our digestible product because they are not equipped to map terrorism networks as opposed to anti-money laundering. They have a gap with the intelligence and Coleven can help.
The financial system is powerful. Military action can disrupt terrorist organizations. Law enforcement can persecute them, but if you remove access to funding, you reduce their ability to recruit, operate, travel, purchase equipment and expand. Money is the oxygen that allows these networks to survive. We focus on the financial layer because it is one of the most effective points of intervention. Eyal, do you want to share how it all started?
Eyal Azoulay:
What is financial crime enforcement? When we talk about a crime, enforcement is the local police, the state police, and the FBI to enforce the laws. In finance, the regulator within the government says, “Here are the rules and best practices.”
The enforcement arms are the financial institutions themselves. They build the operation and execute enforcement including judgment and penalties. An organization is the prosecutor, the judge and the executor. All three within a financial institution who can’t see the details from the noise. It’s not scalable. If they are not doing good work, the government will say, “Here’s a big penalty and here is where you failed.”
You don’t need to go to the regulator. If you want to be effective, you need to go to the enforcement arm within financial institutions.
Larry Bernstein:
Financial institutions often harass innocent bank customers by mistake.
Eyal Azoulay:
Innocent citizens can get penalized and it’s almost impossible to get back from it. There are huge amount of suspicious alerts activities and tools that handle that at scale are bad. Everything is static about one single point. If you don’t understand something within the context, how can you make a judgment?
Larry Bernstein:
We got two different concepts: alpha error and beta error. Alpha error is when you miss the terrorist. Beta error is when you misdiagnose an innocent. Missing the terrorist is worse, but damning an innocent is also problematic. The reality is it’s like finding a needle in a haystack. In a normal day’s work for a bank, there aren’t much terrorist activities. It’s predominantly innocent people who get snagged. I am both an individual and a partner in a financial institution. KYC – Know Your Customer is a total mess.
Eyal Azoulay:
Oh yeah.
Larry Bernstein:
Their collection of information about me seems ridiculous. If my passport were to expire that is a problem as if my US citizenship is now in doubt. They want me to swear that I’m not doing business in Sudan.
Are current KYC best practices effective in achieving its goals or is it simply a nuisance for most innocent customers?
Ellie:
This is something that we’re dealing with every day. How do you identify Hakohen, which is a common Israeli name with Kahane Chai, which is a group of extremists. Terrorism is a small niche within the KYC ecosystem. It is the hardest to find because it’s about putting a lot of dots together and mapping seemingly innocent names and entities to put them all together rather than to follow actual monies and things that raise red flags. And we need the human eye to be professional to sit and map.
Banks lack the human resource to do this. As we speak, number 24 in Hamas can register himself with any US bank because he’s not part of the US blacklist.
Now the very same person, number 24 in Hamas won’t dare walk into a bank in Israel. We were managing to map the cousin of the #1 in Hamas because her family name was familiar to our researchers, but I’m not sure that every top bank in the United States can be familiar with such a family name.
Larry Bernstein:
Eyal, you mentioned that the bank is a self-regulating organization.
Eyal Azoulay:
It is extremely regulated but not on the right things.
Larry Bernstein:
The banks have been read the Riot Act that if they screw up and allow a Mexican mob to bank with them. They will get a huge fine and heads are going to roll.
There’s a check the box mentality without a vision as to the real sense of what’s going on. I saw the TV show Ozark.
Eyal Azoulay:
Exactly.
Larry Bernstein:
Tell me about the bad guys working around the check the box.
Eyal Azoulay:
First of all, I 100% agree. The top five banks in the US have 9,000 people executing this work. They are spending $250 billion every year on a system that is over-featured to make sure that the regulator is happy and is not pissed at us.
Over featured, over engineered only to that metric, not can I find bad actors and wash them out of my system? Can I reduce the amount of friction that I bring on innocent people? These are not the goals. There is a single goal and the single metric is keeping the regulator happy. That’s it. $250 billion of operation in an industry that is focused only on one thing and that’s where the problem is. It’s only checking the boxes is making it look like we’re spending a lot of money. If you go to a risk organization, let’s say with Bank of America, JP Morgan, Citibank. You tell them, “You can do A, B, C and make it better and reduce people you’re going to say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa.”
I’m not going to go back to the regulator and telling I’m spending less money because then it will be piecemeal. That’s the problem. The concept of KYC, know your person you are interacting with. Larry, you and I can go into business together. We’re acting on good faith of what’s going to happen.
But when we shake hands, there’s mutual risk exposure. I bring exposure to you, you bring exposure to me and we need to understand it. That’s the essence of what they’re trying to do in a bank in a KYC. Who is that person in front of me and what is the exposure that that person, that entity can create for me as a bank? Now because everything is superficial, everything is about checking the box, they’re looking on data out of context. They don’t go deeper to understanding why because they have neither the tools nor the people with the right skills and don’t have the motivation to do it.
Larry Bernstein:
Tell us about not understanding money movement in context.
Eyal Azoulay:
First of all, it’s a business. We spoke about the motivation towards making sure that the regulator is not unhappy with us. The goal is to push as much business volume as we can.
You have stakeholder fiduciary rights. So how do you manage that balance? You check the boxes and then the regulator is not unhappy with you. The problem with the gray area. It’s a concept that says that I can deal with 80% and they will be fine. The rest of the 20% are great people like Larry and 10% of them are number 10 in Hezbollah. They don’t care. Simple as that.
Larry Bernstein:
Ellie, how does your organization figure out who the bad actors are, and why are you successful when big banks fail despite billion-dollar budgets?
Ellie:
We are focusing on providing financial institutions with clear maps about organizations and individuals, showing the connection between an individual to a certain NGO, another company that will lead to one hop from a sanctioned entity.
When you’re sitting with a compliance officer, you start at the end. And the end is a sanctioned person or entity. Second from the end is the other guy that has a business relationship with this sanctioned entity. We are focusing on that gray area for those gatekeepers and provide them with insightful intelligence.
Now we bring our findings only from the open source, from the social media, from tax registrations. We have our secret sauce - the mapping and provide evidence that is verified and trustable. However, it’s not a level that will be required by a court. Our map backed by reports that are clickable. We save gatekeepers time and prevent huge fines and even criminal charges for senior management of these banks.
What makes us a very unique NGO is that we bring actual intelligence to the desks of those who can act upon it. KYC is about checking the boxes, but it’s about a different behavior and typologies that represent the financing of terrorism as opposed to money laundering. We know it’s because we also conduct educational sessions with the compliance and fraud teams.
Larry Bernstein:
What is your interaction like with the banks?
Ellie:
Dealing with banking disclosure, they cannot share with us certain information. Once we can bring a bank our reports, they happily respond that it received with thanks, but they will never share with us a certain individual name that came through this net.
They’ll just thank us because we help them with their potential exposure. We do have some indications because we verify that our report was opened 400 times by the same compliance department at a certain bank. A high opening rate of our materials, we know for sure they have interest with that information.
Larry Bernstein:
Your job is a whack-a-mole.
Ellie:
You couldn’t define it better.
Larry Bernstein:
There’s the bad actor who needs the cash. Cash is the oxygen for every organization. They need to get cash from friends of the bad organization. You shut down one of their bank accounts and they will open a replacement. It’s like water. Water is insidious. If you have a leak in the roof, it will find its way through your ceiling. Cash is like water. Tell us about the whack-a-mole and how you deal with it.
Ellie:
The whack-mole is complicated. It’s not only about cash finding its way through the cracks, but also that certain individuals that managed to evade the sanction list. So only their organization was sanctioned, but senior management didn’t get onto the blacklist. They managed to open the new organization and are familiar with the student groups that funded antisemitism within the universities such as SJP and AMP. They’re all about the same people that are shutting down and opening up the organization. So, it’s not only about the money, it’s also about the way they’re structuring their organizations.
It is a never-ending whack-a-mole. I’m looking at my researchers sitting in the next room putting the dots together again and again and again and mapping these materials. How come they don’t give up?
Sometimes they already know their organizations and the individuals. They know him because they met him in another case and he pops up in another case and another organization and so on. The money goes with them. However, we have our indications that we disrupt them. It’s not only about freezing and shutting down certain accounts. It is also about raising the awareness of the gatekeepers to those phenomena and to the way they behave and to the regulator list.
The regulator managed to shut down an organization we provide with the name of the five senior management of that organization, which are no less important and have their contribution to the situation.
As a nonprofit organization with a very lean operation, we cannot solve the financing of terrorism problem. We know that billions of dollars are going through the Western financial institutions and we cannot solve it all. Money will always find its way to the malicious hands. But we’re trying to interfere with this cash movement and make it less easy to operate out in the open and more difficult for those networks to collaborate to transfer the money.
That is similar to how the US government is trying to deal with drugs. Drugs will not vanish from the world, but fighting the drugs within the United States making it difficult for them to operate and extend.
It’s about sealing the cracks to make it harder for those networks to work. We read their reactions in the social media. They don’t exactly know who but they are complaining about the difficulties they are facing recently in the places we are active like with fundraising platforms. When we tackle a certain URL that is fundraising monies to fund terror. When we manage to shut down such a campaign, this is a win that we can point at because it’s just shutting down the campaign and freezing hundreds of millions of dollars.
Larry Bernstein:
I’ve given a charitable donation to your organization and I encourage my listeners to consider it as part of their active giving because your mission and impact per dollar of contribution is substantial. Ellie, can you give our listeners a reason to give money to your organization to reduce terrorism?
Ellie:
Larry, thank you so much for your kind donation. Here is a link to our donation page. We’re a nonprofit organization providing information for free and banks cannot resist to receive it.
Larry Bernstein:
They’re stuck.
Ellie:
They’re stuck when they’re familiar with this information. So here is a lean team sitting in one room in Tel Aviv, you should see our office here. They’re not elegant, very modest, best analysts we have in the country coming from amazing units in the IDF.
Larry Bernstein:
Do you have Americans with banking experience who have moved to Israel to work for your organization?
Ellie:
We have some Olim Hadashim that are here that made Aliyah to Israel and coming from the banking system in the United States. We have here someone who was in charge of fraud in one of the big banks in the United States so he can provide us with the other angles.
Speaking of our impact, one of the top tier banks in the United States stopped correspondent banking thanks to accurate information we’ve managed to provide that bank. Billions of dollars were frozen.
Larry Bernstein:
For our listeners what that means, if ColEven were to flag a terrorist organization using a Lebanese bank several times. a US Bank will stop doing business with the corresponding bank in Lebanon.
Ellie:
It is as simple as that.
Larry Bernstein:
What are you optimistic about as it relates to undermining terrorist organizations ability to move cash?
Ellie:
To collaborate with like-minded organizations that are doing amazing work and we can share our insights and shorten investigation times as well as raising the awareness of the biggest institutions and with the regulators. We will interrupt in a massive way money and interfere organizations working with Western financial institutions.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Ellie and Eyal for joining us.
If you missed our previous podcast, it was Encouraging Debate with College Students.
Our speaker was Daniel Diermeier who is the Chancelor of Vanderbilt. Daniel spoke about how the administration builds a culture of political neutrality on campus that encourages free speech and allows for debate without shaming.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.
Check out our previous episode, Encouraging Competing Viewpoints Among College Students, here.
