August 9 2016
The SWIFT Institute has released new research on the challenges of information statecraft for today’s global financial community. The report, ‘Multinational Banking and Conflicts among US-EU AML/CTF Compliance & Privacy Law: Operational & Political Views in Context,’ focuses on the duality between laws that seek to use data to protect the financial system and laws that seek to protect data privacy. It reveals the many compliance areas that will challenge multinational financial institutions as they integrate privacy into their anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorism finance (CTF) operations over the next two years.
According to the study, the European Union’s Anti-Money Laundering Directive (4AMLD) requires enterprise-wide data protection within AML/CTF operations across a multinational financial institution (MFI), while US law does not, which creates regulatory risk. In the US, data is typically the property of the entity that possesses it, for example a bank, whilst in the EU’s rule-based privacy regime data ownership belongs to the individual as a human right, this can conflict with AML/CTF regulations.