FATF meeting scheduled to discuss VASPs compliance

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has scheduled a plenary meeting on June 24 to monitor the progress of Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs) across the world in imposing the organization’s “travel rule”.

The FATF has arranged a virtual meeting on June 24 to assess the progress of participating countries in complying with the travel rule https://t.co/fIgfyuafkp

— Cointelegraph (@Cointelegraph) June 8, 2020

According to sources, the FATF meeting will be conducted virtually to discuss the organization’s recommendations designed to make VASPs complacent with anti-money laundering (AML) and Anti-Terrorist Financing (ATF) rules. The FATF member jurisdictions must display progress on the implementation of the travel rule, as their efforts will be reviewed at the June 24 meeting.

In June 2019, the FATF advised global regulators to adopt its AML compliances for cryptocurrencies. The guidelines were later known as the travel rule and provided a number of AML and ATF measures for exchanges to prevent cryptocurrencies from being used illegally. 

The FATF said it would “monitor implementation of the new requirements by countries and service providers and conduct a 12-month review in June 2020,” providing the crypto community about a year to catch up.

Although the regulations are not legally binding, they can be highly effective. Any country that does not adhere to the guidelines by the deadline may be removed from the global financial network.

Cointelegraph spoke to CoolBitX Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Michael Ou, whose company is developing technology specifically to comply with the travel rule. 

According to Michael Ou, the CEO of CoolBitX, out of the 200 countries making up the FATF, nearly 20 or so have issued rules covering the travel rule. However, the remaining countries are making “significant progress”, which will be analyzed at the June 24 meeting.

Although there is only a limited number of VASPs in compliance right now. It is expected that the number will rise exponentially before the end of the year.

In addition to complying with the guidelines themselves, VASPs in participating countries have to establish that the travel rule will come into effect at different times in different countries. Each jurisdiction might interpret the guidelines in a different way.