Nigeria’s Senate Passes Bill to Tighten Money Laundering Rules

Richard Marley
March 17, 2022
2 minutes read
2052

Nigeria’s Senate has passed a bill that is aimed at improving the country’s money laundering regulations by adding the requirement of reporting suspicious transactions.

The Money Laundering Prevention and Prohibition Act 2022 obliges lenders to report all single transactions worth more than 5 million naira ($12,035) made by individuals and those involving businesses worth more than 10 million naira to the Special Control Unit Against Money Laundering.

The panel will be set up as part of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission.

Individuals who break the new law will face jail sentences ranging between two to five years, while banks and financial institutions could face fines of up to 50 million naira. The government also added in the emailed statement that employees working at these institutions could also face prosecution.

Banks, other financial institutions, and professionals will also be legally required “to identify and assess the money laundering and terrorism financing risks that may arise in relation to the development of new products and new business practices,” it said.

The lower House of Representatives of Nigeria will also pass the bill before it is sent to President Muhammadu Buhari for including it into the law.

Nigeria has been promoting digital payments in recent years even though most of the transactions in the country are still cash-based.

The circulation of Nigeria’s naira notes and coins went up 4.6% last October.

Nigeria does have a new digital currency, which the Central Bank there wants to use to encourage digital payments. This would cut down on the cost of printing cash and would promote financial inclusion.

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IMF Urges Central Bank of Seychelles to Upgrade Transparency and AML Controls
The Central Bank of Seychelles (CBS) has been advised by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to have transparent practices and AML controls.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has urged CBS, the Central Bank of Seychelles, to incorporate refined practices in different accountability and governance areas. These include confidentiality, supervisory & confidentiality policies along with internal AML/CFT protocols.

According to the statement by IMF, CBS is giving information regarding legal structure, mandate, and a few key elements related to anti-corruption arrangements, risk and human resource management, and accountability on its website.

The review of IMF stated, “To better support the public’s perception of the CBS as a well-governed institution, it should consider highlighting these aspects in its annual report, and/or provide additional information on its website, particularly on human capital management, anti-corruption policies and decision-making arrangements.”

As per IMF’s review, CBS needs to work on several elements, including information’s accessibility to its internal governance arrangements. It could be done by maintaining the Annual Report’s respective sections and website. Moreover, it must overhaul the proceedings by publishing its Code of Conduct and Ethics.

“The legal mechanism for confidentiality issues has been established, but the dissemination and disclosure of the confidentiality framework could be enhanced. The CBS discloses basic information on its AML/CFT supervisory powers and policies, as well as on its related internal control framework, but disclosures on the processes and outcomes of its AML/CFT external policies and internal controls are limited,” said CBS Transparency Code Review of IMF.

IMF review said that the ensurance of transparency practices with new functions and powers by CBS would be effective for its own benefit. The practices adopted by CBS must comply with the powers acquired by the coming legislative act.

IMF’s CBS Transparency Code Review said, “In the last few years, the CBS’s regulatory powers have been substantially expanded with the adoption of AML/CFT Act and Financial Consumer Protection Act. Moreover, the forthcoming Financial Stability Act is expected to provide a transparent legal basis for the CBS’s (and other financial sector regulators) actions on financial stability. These legislative acts will require an expansion of the CBS’s transparency practices so that the related CBS activities continue to be appropriately disclosed to stakeholders.”

The review aims to identify the strength and improvement areas of CBS by allowing it to evaluate its transparency practices. The review presents the map of CBS’s transparency choices in comparison to several practices in three different categories (core, comprehensive, and expanded).

Suggested Read: FCA Advises Firms to Embed Data and Technology to Combat Financial Crimes

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Improving Identity Verification Processes Through Perpetual KYC - How Shufti Pro Helps the Banking Sector
Banks are considered a subset of the financial services industry and play the most crucial role in global economies. Banks mobilize the deposits from households and spread them across the countries, making the funds available for investments. Due to the high influx of money into this sector, criminals have started exploiting the loopholes resulting in several crimes, particularly identity theft, money laundering, and terrorist financing. It is quite crucial for all financial institutions particularly banks to implement a robust system of customer verification to counter prevailing scams.

In US alone, illicit bank transfers or payment fraud resulted in financial losses amounting to $756 million in 2021. Although the whole banking sector has implemented stringent measures to curb financial scams, they are still common, and the overall rate is increasing every year. It has become mandatory for banking organizations to evolve the contemporary Know Your Verification (KYC) measures and implement them in an advanced way to counter the sophisticated techniques of criminals. Perpetual KYC, commonly known as P-KYC, is one of the effective solutions that has the capacity to revolutionize banks’ scrutiny systems and execute customer verification through a modern approach.

An Overview of Perpetual KYC

All financial organizations like banks, insurance companies, and crypto exchanges use a variety of KYC measures to verify the true identities of their users. It is generally performed in order to understand who the business is interacting with. The majority of digital businesses generally verify their client and customers at the start of business while keeping a record of their personal details like name, ID number, social security, address, etc. Perpetual KYC takes this further by introducing a process that keeps on verifying customers continuously, monitors their transactions, and puts different strategies in place to report any suspicious activity.

Perpetual KYC just differs from regular KYC in the way that it keeps on regulating the users’ data and serves its purposes in a more advanced way. All the financial companies in search of better security, improved transparency, and secure customer relationships are using P-KYC. It is not only beneficial for digital businesses but also ensures the safety of users’ identities and assets. In this way, financial service providers can react to any suspicious activity quickly and take strict action to halt it.

The Need for Perpetual KYC in Banking Sector

The banking sector is thought to be the backbone of any country’s economy, and due to rising crime cases, it is in dire need of an effective and constant customer due diligence system. It is estimated that the market capitalization of the global banking sector was 7.3 trillion euros in the second quarter of 2022, which highlights the importance of perpetual KYC. The banks have billion of customers globally and due to rising cases of money laundering and terrorist financing, it has become mandatory to keep a strict check on all the transactions.

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Recent Crime Cases in the Banking Industry

The banking sector has always remained a prime target of financial criminals due to its exposure to huge investments and funds. Criminals use a variety of advanced techniques to carry out money laundering inflicting a myriad of damages on the overall economic system. Several cases have been witnessed in the recent past where criminals were charged with committing bank fraud.

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US law enforcement authorities recently arrested a gang of 11 members who were involved in bank fraud and money laundering. All the criminals have been charged in court, and investigations have found that they were involved in payment fraud of more than $9 million, which was sent to other countries through money laundering. The scammers were using fake identities of 50 different users to commit fraud. Court has ordered to carry on the investigations and found more transactions related to the case.

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US

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UK

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Nigeria’s Senate Passes Bill to Tighten Money Laundering Rules

An Overview of Perpetual KYC

The Need for Perpetual KYC in Banking Sector

Recent Crime Cases in the Banking Industry

Criminal Gang in US Charged with Bank Fraud and Money Laundering

Two Former Employees of Major Bank Charged with Loan Fraud

Global Regulatory Authorities Monitoring the Banking Sector

US

UK

Securing Banking Organizations Through Perpetual KYC

What Shufti Pro Offers?

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