On Wednesday 12 January the European Banking Federation (EBF) expressed some reservations about the European Commission’s proposal for an anti-money laundering package due in 2023.
The EBF believes that “a paradigm shift is needed”. The current approach, considered “legalistic and bureaucratic”, according to the federation generates massive flows of irrelevant data that financial intelligence units cannot exploit effectively.
The organisation believes that the package proposed on 20 July 2021 will address the “current fragmentation of regulation and oversight”; and it encourages greater transparency of crypto-asset service providers. The EBF also welcomes the standardisation of key customer identification information and the establishment of the European Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA).
However, it criticises an overly prescriptive approach and fears that the room for manoeuvre left to Member States to adopt additional measures could lead to over-regulation and thus reintroduce fragmentation.
As for the registers of ultimate beneficial owners (UBOs), they “should not only be harmonised and interconnected, but also significantly strengthened”, it recommends. It would like to see use made “of new technologies and the involvement of all actors in the anti-money laundering framework, including law enforcement and public-private partnerships”. (Original version in French by Anne Damiani)