FinCEN director warns banks about cryptocurrency risk exposure

FinCEN has warned U.S. banks that it is closely watching how they respond to crypto risk exposure with their AML programs.

The U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) director Kenneth Blanco has warned banks to think seriously about their cryptocurrency risk exposure.

During the virtual 2020 ACAMS anti-money laundering Conference in Las Vegas this week, Blanco discussed the obligations of banks in implementing effective anti-money laundering (AML) policies.

Current FinCEN regulations (FIN-2019-A003) state that it is the responsibility of all financial institutions to identify and report suspicious activity concerning how criminals and other bad actors exploit card verification checks for money laundering, sanctions evasion, and other illicit financing purposes. For many banks, it is still unclear how virtual currencies affect their institutions.

The director emphasized the need for banks to have another look at their AML policies and procedures, especially in relation to cryptocurrencies, adding that “if banks are not thinking about these issues, it will be apparent when examiners visit.”

“To be clear, exchanges are not the only ones with crypto risk exposure. These risks are not unique to money services businesses or virtual currency exchanges; banks must be thinking about their crypto exposure as well. These are areas your examiners, and FinCEN, will ask you about when assessing the effectiveness of your AML program.”

According to research by crypto analytics firm CipherTrace Labs in 2019, eight of the ten major U.S. retail banks had dealings with illicit crypto money service businesses (MSBs). These MSBs accept cash payments in exchange for crypto, essentially running as unregistered P2P exchanges.

In addition many P2P exchanges have no AML or know-your-customer (KYC) programs in place, resulting in extensive money laundering risks to banks and other financial institutes.

Banks have long been criticized for failing to maintain robust AML and KYC programs. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICJI) report that more than $2 trillion of processed transactions have been identified by banks as suspicious and should be frozen. The amount of suspicious money not identified by banks could be many times larger.

from https://ift.tt/3cJ8Vkl
https://ift.tt/345BZP8

Comments

DeFi isn’t dead, it just needs to fix these 3 critical problems

It’s been a rough year for DeFi, and it may not get any better until projects focus more on security, regulation and usability. The persistent challenges decentralized finance face have been well documented by a handful of analysts and the recent collapse of the Terra ecosystem re-enforced the fact that something is critically wrong with DeFi. I think DeFi today is completely broken for 99% of the population. The promise of a more transparent financial system has been overtaken by greed. UST/LUNA is just the latest in a string of bad developments: — Peter Yang (@petergyang) May 11, 2022 Let's take a look at what experts say DeFi needs to do in order to have another revival. Improved usability To date, the promise of open and uncensored access to a global decentralized financial system has been largely hampered by the complicated interface, confusing multi-step staking processes and lack of clarity surrounding the yields on various tokens. What do you thi...

ENS DAO delegates offer perspective on DAO governance and decentralized identity

AlphaWallet CEO and Spruce co-founder talk about their roles as contributors to the Ethereum Name Service following the project's recent airdrop. Earlier this month, the Ethereum Name Service, or ENS, formed a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, for the ENS community. Cointelegraph spoke to two ENS DAO delegates who applied for the opportunity to represent the community and stay involved in the decision making process: Victor Zhang, CEO of AlphaWallet, an open source Ethereum wallet, and Gregory Rocco, co-founder of Spruce, a decentralized ID and data toolkit for developers. Zhang spoke about his experience as an external contributor to ENS and an early supporter since 2018. Zhang initially sought to help ENS by offering Alpha Wallet as a user-friendly tool for resolving .eth names and cryptocurrency wallet addresses. Essentially, if a user inputs an .eth name in the AlphaWallet, it will show the wallet address, and vice versa using reverse resolution. Alpha...

National Futures Association adds rules for members handling digital assets

The CFTC-linked self-regulatory organization (SRO) has disclosure rules for members engaging in activities with BTC and ETH; now, standards of conduct are being added. The National Futures Association (NFA), the United States self-regulatory organization for derivatives markets, has issued a new compliance rule addressing members’ conduct. The new rule complements requirements issued in 2018. The NFA has “well over 100” members that engage in activities with digital asset commodities, but no way to address fraud or misconduct committed by those members, the organization explained to secretary of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Christopher Kirkpatrick in a Feb. 28 letter as it submitted the proposed new rule for approval. The new rule is modelled on the NFA’s antifraud rules for exchange traded futures and swaps transaction and retail foreign exchange. The NFA is the only registered self-regulatory organization that has delegated authority from the CFTC, giving it a...

Crypto Coin Search

Search This Blog