How will the FinCEN revisions impact your business? (Part 1)
Some recently published FinCEN revisions and advisories are causing a stir. First, let’s look at revisions to Customer Due Diligence that require compliance by May 2018.
Under the updated requirements for Customer Due Diligence, covered financial institutions must expand programs, including Customer Identification Programs (CIP), to include Beneficial Owners of Legal Entity customers. Under the new rule, financial institutions must collect and verify identity information (name, address, date of birth, Social Security number or passport number for foreign individuals):
- For each Natural Person with at least 25% ownership in the Legal entity
and
- For an individual with significant responsibility for managing or controlling the business — for example, a chief executive officer, a chief financial officer, a chief operating officer, a managing member, a general partner, a president, a vice president or a treasurer
The U.S. Treasury estimates that illicit proceeds generated in the United States alone total $400 billion annually. These requirements are intended to prevent anonymous access to financial systems through shielded or minority ownership. While the effort to stem the tide of illicit proceeds is laudable, the impact to business may be significant. Most organizations will need to audit their data collection practices, and many will need to make changes to either data collection or workflow processes to ensure compliance.
While quite simple and straightforward on paper, the standardization of additional CIP policies and procedures tend to create substantive impact to the customer experience as well as operational resource allocations and utilization. Covered financial institutions should already be discussing with their current or prospective fraud risk and identity management vendors to ensure that:
- There is a clear path to altering both data collection and verification of these additional identity elements.
- Clear and accurate benchmarking around expected verification rates is available ahead of the compliance date to allow for operational workflow design to accommodate both ‘verifications’ and ‘referrals stemming from lack of full verification.’
- Service providers are granting access to best-in-class data assets and search & match logic related to identity element verification and risk assessment, along with multi-layered options to reconcile those initial verification ‘fails.’
- Full business reviews and strategy design sessions are underway or being scheduled to align and document overall objectives of the program, benchmarking of leading industry practices, current and future state gaps, near- and long-term initiatives and a prioritized roadmap, a viable business case toward additional investment in services and resources, and a plan of execution.
Will this impact your business? Will you need to make any changes?
