Rachel Sexton is the Head of the UK Ashurst Risk Advisory practice
Rachel is a former Big Four professional services partner and has over 25 years' experience working with clients in the Financial Services sector. She has led a number of large, complex fraud, money laundering, bribery and corruption, cross-border tax, mis-selling, economic sanctions and other financial crime investigations and regulatory enforcements. Evidence gathered during these investigations has been presented to the US Department of Justice, US Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC), US Office for Foreign Asset Control (OFAC), US Internal Revenue Service (IRS), New York State Department of Financial Services, UK FCA, Swiss Finra and the UK Serious Fraud Office.
Rachel has also worked with financial institutions to remediate the issues identified during investigations and strengthen compliance programmes and build effective controls frameworks and Target Operating Models to address governance and control weaknesses.
She started her career as an auditor and has experience auditing the financial statements and internal controls at a wide range of businesses.
Rachel has a BSc (Hons) in Business Administration with Accountancy concentration from California State University Northridge. She is a US-qualified Certified Public Accountant (CPA) (State of California) and a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE). She has earned post-graduate Diplomas in Anti-Money Laundering and Financial Crime Prevention from the International Compliance Association. She earned the EY Sustainable Finance Programme certificate at INSEAD in 2022.
She is a Board Trustee of the Fraud Advisory Panel and JUSTICE.