In a world that’s changed overnight, banks that find a secure way to provide digital services, from everyday customer support to KYC, will come out ahead in the race to keep customers loyal. Traditional financial institutions who don’t adapt risk losing current customers and being unable to attract new clients.
Attention will focus on a much-trailed new body: the EU Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA) – totemic of a tougher and better co-ordinated EU approach, as we wrote last year.
The FCA alleges that increasingly large cash deposits were made into the customer’s accounts. It is alleged that around £365 million was paid into the customer’s accounts, of which around £264 million was in cash.
India, as of this year, has a median age for the population of 29. So, when you're looking for a young crowd, India has got that right age. The number of millennials is continuously increasing, and in a 1.2 billion population, if your median age is 29, you can imagine the numbers spoken about.
It is easy to see why, in the context of the UK, such a law may be needed. Of the more than 460,000 Suspicious Activity Reports sent by UK banks to the UK Financial Intelligence Unit in recent years for suspicious transactions, the government’s Law Commission concluded that many were of “low-quality” and that many banks had a poor understanding of their reporting obligations, reporting less to assist the authorities than to avoid a law suit.
“US authorities have dominated the global AML landscape through the imposition of numerous huge fines for AML failings. But that has changed somewhat in recent years - US fine amounts have fallen while other jurisdictions, particularly in Europe, have imposed very large fines of their own,” explains Duff & Phelps’ head of UK regulatory consulting Nick Bayley.
