Keeping Up With the Regulators — November 2019 Week #3
Your weekly briefing on what’s new in KYC/AML for FinTechs
Published in
3 min readNov 22, 2019
As promised, Fractal is sharing our weekly briefings to help FinTechs stay up-to-date with the latest developments in the KYC/AML regulatory space. In case you missed our last issue, here it is:
Find last weeks’ briefing below:
Week 08.11.2019–15.11.2019
What’s cooking in the regulatory space?
- EU: Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands and Latvia joint statement says the EU needs a central AML supervisor and uniform AML laws
- Germany: BaFin launches a market survey on cryptocurrency derivatives
- Germany: Parliament passes a raft of AML measures to bring the country in line with EU directives
- Hong Kong: Securities and Futures Commission will soon lay down a regulatory framework for crypto exchanges
- India: KYC processes can rely on a self-declared address different from the one in Aadhaar
- India: Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy recommends India to regulate payment aggregators and payment gateways
- Irland: Firms that miss the deadline to submit information on beneficial ownership to the Companies Office may face fines up to €500,000
- Ireland: FATF publishes Mutual Evaluation Report of Ireland
- Singapore: BIS and MAS launch innovation hub that will focus on trusted digital identities and connecting regulators to the fintech community
- UK: Under new tax guidance draft, crypto assets are deemed personal investment subject to capital gains tax and mining rewards are taxable income
- US: FinCEN reissued its Geographic Targeting Order, eliminating reporting requirements for SEC-regulated businesses, self-regulatory organizations and entities solely owned by such business
- Zimbabwe: FATF publishes Follow-up Report on Zimbabwe’s progress in strengthening the AML/CTF system
News
- A new Protiviti/IRTA study on KYC recommends the use of shared KYC platforms to eliminate redundancies and improve customer experience
- Gekko Lab and HKEX win Regtech Award for creating one of the most comprehensive databases of Hong Kong-listed company transactions
- CipherTrace conference gathers regulators, banks, crypto companies and programmers together to make sense of the new FATF crypto guidelines
- Google plans on offering checking accounts to consumers starting next year
- FATF’s Digital ID report pushes for increasing the use of digital ID for Know Your Customer (KYC) and anti-fraud efforts
- Huobi Chain, the public blockchain that could enable regulators to supervise the enforcement of AML regulations, is now publicly available
- Basel published guidelines to improve the supervision of banks’ AML/CTF measures and compliance
- Sweedish National Operations Department wants a revision of the AML regulations, as it finds Swish (the mobile payment service) in a loophole
The AML’s Watch
- Denmark’s financial regulator has ordered the Danish unit of Swedish Handelsbanken to strengthen its AML efforts and revise its risk evaluation
- The People’s Bank of China took a total of 189.3 million yuan ($27.6 million) in money laundering fines, a year-on-year increase of 41%
- Philippines’ virtual currency exchanges reported 90,000 suspicious transactions between January 2018 until July 2019
- Danske Bank’s Estonian branch found to have allegedly helped Russian clients hide funds by converting their money into gold bullion
Add this to your knowledge folder
- Overview of Dubai’s and Abu Dhabi’s financial crimes regulatory frameworks
- What’s changing in the Australian AML framework
Good reads
- Despite its reputation, crypto can make it easier for regulators and governments to follow the money trail
- The ways AI can change the financial industry
- How advanced analytics and AI can tip the scales in favour of AML prevention
- False positives in sanctions enforcement are impacting PayPal’s customers
- The evolution of the regulatory approach to crypto exchanges
- Distributed AI to tackle money laundering
About the Author:
Catarina Veloso is a legal counsel at Fractal and co-chair of INATBA’s identity working group — Catarina specialized in energy law and focused on how blockchain technology can contribute to the management of electricity grids; but an unexpected(-ly happy) turn of events lead her to work closely with Fractal’s product team to remove all the friction while keeping all the compliance in a global KYC/AML onboarding solution.
