08/26/2026
Checking into the halls of Jesus College, Cambridge, for the Cambridge International Symposium on Economic Crime felt so providential.
I came to speak about Conscience IQ, economic crime, data security, and the future of the Economic Crime & Geopolitics Index — ECGI. Yet Cambridge itself seemed to speak back.
A few streets away from where we gathered, the Cambridge theologian William Perkins helped shape one of the great Protestant traditions of conscience. His work on the cases of conscience asked a question that still matters: how does the inner moral life of a person become visible in public conduct?
That question has not disappeared.
It has merely changed its theatre.
In Perkins’ day, conscience was tested in vocation, trade, money, oath, duty, neighbourliness, and the commonwealth. In our day, it is tested in documents, shell companies, public office, AI systems, cross-border flows, sanctions, procurement, whistleblowing, and the integrity of institutions.
The Puritans were not merely private moralists. At their best, they brought a severe and searching attention to the whole architecture of life: worship, learning, labour, trade, family, law, and public trust. Their iconoclasm stripped away ornament where ornament had begun to hide corruption. Their discipline of the Word helped form habits that modern academic life still depends on: argument, evidence, examination, literacy, accountability, and the refusal to let authority stand without scrutiny.
That same impulse is needed again.
Economic crime is not only a financial event. It is a disorder of conscience made institutional. It is what happens when trust is broken, evidence is obscured, duty is sold, and the moral imagination of a system becomes numb.
This is why the launch of the ECGI at Cambridge mattered to me.
The ECGI asks us to read economic crime through four forces: the depth of corruption, the severity of economic crime, people’s response, and geopolitical pressure. With Conscience IQ, we can begin to measure the human signals that sit underneath those forces: corruption tolerance, moral rationalisation, civic trust, reporting fear, institutional fatigue, and public response.
With Mithra and ShelterZoom’s Document GPS, we can strengthen the evidence layer: tokenized documents, provenance, chain of custody, immutability, revocation, traceability, and audit-ready AI outputs.
That is the bridge I felt so strongly in Cambridge.
The old language was conscience.
The new language is evidence provenance, data lineage, civic response, and foresight.
But the moral question is still the same: can we build systems where truth is not easily hidden, where evidence cannot quietly disappear, and where public trust is not sacrificed to private gain?
It was an honour to present this work at Jesus College, to attend dinners with Fiona de Lanerolle and fellow clergymen and friends John & Kelcey besterwich where grace was still said before the meal, and to meet people of such depth from law, enforcement, compliance, academia, policy, and civil society.
My thanks to the Cambridge International Symposium on Economic Crime, to Dr Asanga Abeyagoonasekera for his leadership in launching ECGI, and to my fellow contributors Ms Le and premphe .
Cambridge reminded me that conscience is not an old word.
It is an unfinished task.
And perhaps, in an age of AI and economic crime at machine speed, it is becoming one of the most urgent words we have.
