Who Is

Meet Our Founders:

James Freis –

Co-founder James H. Freis, Jr., provided the inspiration for CRINDATA.  As Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer, he continues to anticipate the needs of financial institutions and their service providers, and to foresee creative solutions.

Jim has devoted his career to promoting the integrity of the global financial markets.  He is best known in the United States as the longest-serving Director (2007 to 2012) of the United States Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), overseeing regulations covering the broadest range of financial institutions in coordination with their primary licensing authorities, and for applying data-driven efforts to combat fraud exposed through the Global Financial Crisis.  From 2014 to 2020 he was based in Frankfurt, Germany with the Deutsche Börse Group, Europe’s largest provider of systemically significant financial market infrastructures, responsible for overseeing compliance and relations with global regulators including in the implementation of a holistic internal control system approach among Risk, Compliance, Information Security and Outsourcing oversight functions.  Over the first decade of this career as a central banker at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, he advised on payment and settlement systems operations and global wholesale financial transactions, and supported the development of sound principles for prudential regulation among global financial supervisors.

Jim has spearheaded initiatives to forge shared solutions among financial market participants to industry challenges, from the level of intra-group through global critical infrastructures.  In the private sector, he has participated on advisory committees and user groups in the development of priorities and new initiatives of SWIFT, the International Securities Services Association (ISSA), Clearstream and Eurex in the development of best practices for risk management.  He has helped develop specific services and structured processes for knowledge sharing under harmonized due diligence questionnaires, and reasonable reliance on common audits and shared risk mitigation processes.  As FinCEN Director, he chaired the Bank Secrecy Act Advisory Group (BSAAG) with representatives of the financial industry, supervisors, and law enforcement, which was mandated by the U.S. Congress to advise on regulatory requirements and provide feedback to industry.  He has managed and overseen large IT projects and application of data analysis tools and cloud migrations.   He has ensured compliance with confidentiality and privacy and data protection requirements in overseeing implementation of a global GDPR compliant framework; in modernizing FinCEN’s IT systems for the collection, analysis and sharing of data; and as former lead negotiator on behalf of the U.S. Government for the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program.  He has been the responsible executive for delivering critical outsourced services; managed remediations, investigations, and crisis communications; and trained boards of directors, executives and regulators on their responsibilities.

Mark Stetler –

Co-Founder Mark M. Stetler is CEO and also CEO or RegSmart (BeRegSmart.com) a SaaS company that provides technology for financial institutions to automatically assess and manage institutional BSA/AML risks, and holds the Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist (CAMS) certification (acams.org).

Mark is a serial entrepreneur with more 30 years of experience in the financial services and technology space. Mark graduated Baylor University in 1985 with a BBA in Finance (cum laude) and from the University of Texas Law School in 1988 (with honors). He practiced law in a private firm and then for the financial services subsidiary of the nation’s largest homebuilder. He served as general counsel for a multi-state title agent and a mortgage quality assurance company as well as associate general counsel for a top tier mortgage lender. He was a senior partner in NIA Consulting, the nation’s largest financial fraud auditing firm, and was instrumental in arranging the sale of NIA to Interthinx (a subsidiary of Verisk–NASDAQ: VRSK) in 2007.

At CRINDATA, Mark and his team are executing on the vision of bringing a comprehensive platform for business continuity and incident management to the financial services industry. CRINDATA’s goal is to provide a common, industry-wide, secure technological platform for banks, credit unions, and non-bank financial institutions, their fintech partners, and other third party service providers that facilitates the risk management and business continuity/incident management diligence and communications that are both necessary and required by increasingly complex federal and state regulations.