The European Banking Authority (EBA) published on Wednesday 5 February its first report on the competent national authorities’ approaches to the supervision of banks in the fight against money laundering.
Indeed, this is one of the new tasks entrusted to it following the review of the European financial supervision architecture.
For this first report, the EBA reviewed the approaches of seven competent authorities - which it does not name - in five Member States to assess the money laundering risks associated with the banks under their supervision and made recommendations tailored to each of them.
Overall, the report concludes that most of the authorities in the sample have taken significant steps to strengthen their supervisory approach to fight money laundering, including in many cases a significant expansion of their supervisory teams.
“Supervisory staff in all competent authorities had a good, high-level understanding of international and European standards and were committed to the fight against financial crime”, the report states.
Nevertheless, the report points out that the authorities have encountered some difficulties and that the supervision of banks “has not always been effective or as effective as it could have been”.
Each competent authority has encountered difficulties of its own, linked in particular to the nature and size of its domestic banking sector, the EBA points out.
But the EBA also identifies a series of challenges that may be common to all authorities, such as translating theoretical knowledge about risks into supervisory practices and risk-based supervisory strategies and the ability to cooperate effectively with national and international stakeholders.
Competent authorities that have not been reviewed in 2019 will be assessed in the next assessment cycles in 2020, says the EBA.
See report: https://bit.ly/2UtKLU2 (Original version in French by Marion Fontana)