Malena is a Senior Risk Consultant at ValuRisk Partners and serves as the Lead for BSA/AML and Fraud Model Validation, where she supports financial institutions with independent model validations and model risk advisory.
A CAMS-certified risk professional, Malena brings deep experience spanning community banks, regional institutions, and Tier 1 banks. Her background includes validating, reviewing, and supporting the implementation of a wide range of vendor-based and internally developed BSA/AML and fraud models, as well as advising institutions on model governance, performance monitoring, and regulatory defensibility.
Malena’s work is grounded in both technical rigor and practical application. She has extensive experience across conceptual soundness reviews, data integrity assessments, performance and outcome testing, benchmarking, and model governance. Her expertise includes scenario and threshold testing, customer and transaction segmentation, tuning and optimization, and the evaluation of advanced analytics techniques used in modern AML and fraud frameworks.
Known for her precision and judgment, Malena helps clients cut through complexity, identify material risk, and strengthen model defensibility in a way that is proportionate to each institution’s size, risk profile, and regulatory expectations. She shares ValuRisk Partners’ philosophy of right-sized, high-quality validation work that delivers clear, actionable insight rather than boilerplate conclusions.
Malena holds a CAMS certification and has spent her career working at the intersection of compliance, analytics, and model risk management, helping institutions navigate an increasingly complex and fast-evolving regulatory environment.
