Increasing Financial Crimes Call to Establish a European Center of Excellence For AML Compliance

EU financial and anti-financial crime regulations are more complicated than before and they reinforce the need for the compliance officers and MLROs to stay up-to-date with regulatory developments. 

The complexity of today’s EU financial and anti-financial crime regulation has reinforced the need for compliance officers and money laundering reporting officers (MLROs) to keep up to date with regulatory developments.

The European Union’s financial and anti-financial crime regulations emphasized that MLROs and compliance officers need to be up-to-date with the latest regulatory developments. All across Europe, compliance officers face the same challenges in the pace of supranational maximum harmonization regulation. To cope with this, there’s a dire need for establishing a European center of excellence to strengthen regulatory and anti-financial crime compliance. It will provide guidance and training to the operators, especially those who are medium-sized and require more support than others. 

European Single Rulebook provides coordinated prudential rules. It has made the compliance officer’s role more demanding. At the start of 2022, the European Single Rulebook was made with 682 documents for financial service providers. It ranged from guidelines to regulations that nearly consisted of 15,000 pages. Moreover, it included more than 23,000 articles, which makes a considerable number. 

Considering AML and CFT, MLRO’s role will be significantly impacted by the development of the European Single Rulebook. Also, AMLA’s (Anti-Money Laundering Authority) establishment will also affect the position of MLRO (Money Laundering Reporting Officers). AMLA will be assigned different tasks. It will handle the Single Rulebook development and have direct supervisory powers regarding a limited number of selected financial services obliged entities. Especially the ones providing cross-border services are more considerable. 

It’s the EU Single Rulebook’s requirement for financial institutions to follow a system of proper controls. These must be according to the scale and complexity of the businesses as well as the activities involved in them.

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