EU council and Parliament propose an agreement for the strengthening of AML and CFT controls.

The EU council and Parliament have proposed an agreement containing updates and changes to help with combating anti money laundering (AML) and combating the financing of terrorism (CFT)l. If approved there are several areas where they believe they have plugged previous gaps and have tightened up areas of weakness.
The entities covered by previous AML systems and frameworks has been expanded. The new agreement will be applicable to the majority of the crypto currency sector, but also traders of luxury goods including luxury cars and yachts. It will also include professional football clubs and agents.

Anti money laundering and counter terrorist financing is no longer something that has traditionally been seen as a exclusively something that financial institutions and banks have to worry about. 
 - There will be a strengthening of enhanced due diligence (EDD) requirements for certain relationships such as cross-border correspondent relationships and very high net worth individuals.
- There will be changes to cash payment limits and more work done to make beneficial ownership more transparent on registers with the introduction of verification of information when submitting to the central register. The entities in charge of the register will also be able to carry out onsite inspections where it believes there may be a discrepancy with information provided.
- There has been a lot of discussion about greater transparency across the financial sector and this new agreement seeks to ensure that financial intelligence units (FIUs) are able to share data cross border more easily and quickly, with greater guidance on when to suspend a transaction under investigation.
- There are also proposed changes for supervisors and for risk assessments, with the latter coming via a further review and assessment of need.
 
If approved the existing private sector rules will be transferred into a new regulation. The directive itself will apply to institutions at a national level in the member states.
 
As with all new proposals there will undoubtedly be further changes and proposals made, but it appears that there is movement in the right direction to try and combat the ever-increasing threat of money laundering and terrorist financing.
 
We will follow the progress of this proposal closely.
 
The full announcement can be accessed below:
Anti-money laundering: Council and Parliament strike deal on stricter rules - Consilium (europa.eu)