Banks in the European Union are reassessing and reducing the due-diligence profiles they keep on all customers to avoid potentially game-changing fines for breaches of more stringent data protection rules set to take effect next year, say sources.
Financial institutions should plan out how they will investigate news of terrorist attacks, grand-corruption schemes and other high-profile crimes that often bear compliance ramifications, a senior U.S. official said.
A handful of financial institutions looking to improve how they manage their compliance risks are venturing beyond conventional transaction-monitoring processes to analyzing the totality of their interactions with clients, according to senior compliance professionals.
Variances in data-protection rules from country to country are impeding EU investigations of politicos with secret offshore holdings as documented by the Panama Papers, European lawmakers heard Thursday.
As the European Union weighs a new raft of data protection standards, some bankers believe that they can't meet both anti-money laundering demands and Europe's privacy expectations, according to an academic.
Countries should ease their privacy restrictions that hinder cross-border data-sharing on suspicious transactions, according to a Toronto-based intergovernmental group of financial intelligence units.
A renewed emphasis on customer data privacy in the European Union is making it difficult for U.S. financial institutions to conduct background checks on EU customers, and in some cases has exposed them to fines, according to legal consultants.
Because data protection laws in Europe and elsewhere make it difficult for a multinational financial institution to share data among all of its branches, the laws "will be the biggest impediment to protection from terrorism," the officials said.