Anti money laundering and counter terrorism financing legislation

AML – Anti-money laundering and Counter terrorism financing legislation


A major issue to be addressed by the financial institutions worldwide is the need to comply with tough new anti-money-laundering and suspicious transaction reporting laws, including the Know Your Customer (KYC) rules to address the key recommendations of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) “to develop and to promote national and international policies to combat money laundering and terrorist financing”. International governments are introducing new laws and regulations that will impose new requirements on banks and other related industries to encourage them to do more in regards to anti-money laundering (AML), counter terrorism financing (CTF) and in developing solutions to better understand their customers or “know their customers (KYC).

This action is being taken in recognition that vast amounts of money are laundered every year and the problem is not one that is isolated to the banks as it impacts major institutions that may include major investments in property, superannuation, buying hotels, restaurants and any traditional cash-based businesses. In fact, it is estimated that “money launderers are hiding up to $US1 trillion ($1.18 trillion) a year in the world's financial system”. As the monitoring systems and the regulators, together with the financial services industry, continue to strengthen their monitoring and transaction risk management systems, the criminals and money launderers are becoming smarter and harder to detect. The rise of the “intelligent” criminals and money launders means that their very activities are becoming far more difficult to detect and more often appear to be legitimate when the underlying nature of the transaction shows that it has all the hallmarks of “dirty” money.

As the anti-money laundering systems are enhanced, the criminals are turning to their attention to innocent customers of the banks or share brokers by such means as stealing the identities of these customers by employing sophisticated identity theft techniques including use of trojans, rootkits, bots and phishing sites, many of which are undetectable by tradition security software. Also, due to the increased efficiencies of the domestic and international payments systems and share trading technologies supported by the use of online technologies, criminals have come to recognise the ease by which they to can use these systems to transfer funds either domestically or abroad.

TrustDefender provides organisations with an element of the requirement to meet anti money laundering (AML) and counter terrorist financing (CTF) know your customer (KYC) guidelines. Read more on this issue ……..
 

Featured Event

Bottom PromotionMeet the TrustDefender Team at the AusCERT 2008 Conference in Gold Coast, Australia from 18-23rd May 2008. Visit us at our stand

Cool Product

Bottom PromotionThe Financial Trust Network is an open framework to provide the best possible protection for online banking customers with website, network and software policies.

Featured Partner

Bottom PromotionPixel IT is one of Australia's leading network solution providers for all types of organisations ranging from small business to large corporations, including academic and government departments.