The European Authority for Countering Money Laundering and Financing of Terrorism (AMLA) announced it has finalised rules (‘regulatory technical standards (RTS)’) for companies with public tasks in regard of anti-money laundering (AML) and countering financing terrorism (CFT), the ‘obliged entities’ or ‘OEs’.
Contrary to what the AMLA states, these are not key rules, as the most important rules (including those on when transactions, activities or circumstances are considered suspicious and must be reported) have not yet been laid down.
The topics of the rules published are:
- How OEs should distinguish between business relationships and occasional transactions, and how to identify linked transactions, so that customer due diligence thresholds are applied consistently.
- The basics of collecting customer information (‘customer due diligence’).
- Minimum requirements for effective group-wide AML/CFT arrangements, including governance, risk management, internal controls and secure information sharing.
The final rules have been submitted to the European Commission that will adopt them and publish the rules in the official journal. After that the rules will apply after a certain period.
