News
FATF Will Face ‘Difficulties’ In Foray to Shape Global Privacy Laws
By Brian Monroe
printAn international anti-money laundering watchdog group is likely to face resistance to plans to loosen stringent privacy laws on bank data, say analysts. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) is considering recommending that countries allow banks to share compliance-related investigation and customer information across multiple jurisdictions. The Paris-based group is also eyeing calling for better coordination between those who create and enforce privacy laws and the regulatory bodies responsible for anti-money laundering (AML). In the past 22 years, FATF has been a standard-setter for global AML/CFT rules, but the group "will have some difficulty in convincing countries it's a good...
TO READ THE FULL STORY
Subscribe
Learn More
Related News
U.S. officials will soon ask an influential intergovernmental group to call on its members to relax laws preventing bank affiliates from sharing data on suspected financial crimes, say sources.
The world's top financial crime watchdog Thursday disclosed revisions to its blacklists and its widely-cited standards on combating money laundering and terrorist financing.
The world's most influential advocate of anti-money laundering and counterterrorism financing regulations will call for greater scrutiny of political figures and tax crimes next week, say sources.
Intergovernmental evaluations of how nations fight money laundering and terrorist financing often do not accurately reflect whether those efforts are effective, the International Monetary Fund said in a report Wednesday.
The Financial Action Task Force is weighing whether to ask jurisdictions to loosen their privacy laws and require companies to retain data on their owners, among other changes to the group's standards.
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.
Seeking to combat identity theft, federal and state lawmakers have advanced a number of initiatives that would restrict how banks and other companies use Social Security numbers to identify consumers.
Plans for a national identification system that would require personal information to be stored in state-controlled databases will boost bank costs associated with large-scale data breaches, according to privacy consultants and information policy analysts.
An EU advisory panel determined that an international banking consortium violated data protection laws there when it complied with a U.S. administrative subpoena giving the Bush administration access to millions of private financial transaction records.