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News & Views

The CLEAR Picture

Your source for industry-leading best practices to comply with the latest AML and KYC rules and regulations. Get insights into compliance challenges and other threats to your organization from the experts.
March 2017 edition

In this issue

Featured insight

red flagExpert Q&A: The LSTA’s new Know Your Customer Guidelines
In this expert question-and-answer session, Bridget K. Marsh of the Loan Syndications and Trading Association (LSTA) discusses the LSTA’s Know Your Customer Considerations for Syndicated Lending and Loan Trading – the KYC Guidelines. These guidelines are intended to help banks understand the applicability of U.S. anti-money laundering requirements in the context of their syndicated lending and loan trading activities.
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Best practices

The criticality of knowing ultimate beneficial owners
Organizations struggle to identify and govern their relationships with a growing awareness that they can face reputational and economic disaster by establishing or maintaining the wrong business relationships. How can they ensure they are doing business with the right individuals and organizations?
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suspicious activityEffective due diligence in public records investigations (podcast)
What challenges do investigators face in 2017? Expert investigators Cynthia Hetherington from Hetherington Group and William Barth from Thomson Reuters share how investigators can become better at many essential areas to minimize your company’s risk, including locating resources across growing needs, understanding changes in evolving laws, and knowing what to do when “things don’t look right.”
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Spotlight

FINRA’s 2017 exam priorities cite “high-risk” brokers, fundamentals
FINRA gave priority to monitoring “high-risk” brokers in its 2017 Regulation and Examination Priorities letter issued in January. The industry self-regulator also reiterated prior warnings over senior investor abuse, outside business activities, and social media practices, but dropped a specific focus on culture of compliance. A common thread in this year’s priorities is a focus on core “blocking and tackling” issues of compliance, supervision, and risk management.
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Why blockchain could bolster anti-money laundering efforts
While the tech world was recently stirred by the possible unmasking of the creator of Bitcoin, the financial industry remains focused on blockchain, the key technology that makes Bitcoin work. The key innovation of blockchain is having a group track and store transaction records simultaneously rather than each person or firm keeping them individually. This seemingly simple idea could fundamentally change the way that financial activities are conducted, including AML and counter-terrorism financing (CTF) efforts.
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Regulations to watch

AML update: Five areas of greater regulatory scrutiny
As AML programs continue to evolve, regulators are paying greater attention to particular aspects of AML compliance, including governance and execution of model risk management programs, calibration of customer due diligence models, management of sanctions risk, expectations for nonbank service providers, and AML program sustainability. The strategies and tactics that banks and other financial institutions employ in these five areas can have a significant impact on the effectiveness of their AML programs.
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