Accuity Insights Blog

This week saw the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) expose thousands of confidential documents, known as the FinCEN Files. Here, we provide some initial observations on what the leaked documents say about the current state of the global financial crime compliance landscape.

Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) are confidential records of unusual financial activity detected by financial institutions as part of their financial crime compliance obligations. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) received more than 12 million SARs between 2011 and 2017 – and more than two million in 2019 alone.

The real estate industry is frequently used as a conduit for money laundering activities. Every year, around $1.6 trillion of dirty money moves through this market – equivalent to 3% of the world’s GDP. In this article, we explore an important element within this topic – escrow (or trust) accounts.

The EU’s Fifth Anti-money Laundering Directive has extended the list of sectors that fall within the scope of the updated regulations. These new ‘obliged entities’ are required to implement financial crime prevention processes, including adverse media screening, in line with the practices carried out by banks and other regulated sectors.

In the second part of our Q&A with Hdeel Abdelhady, Principal Attorney at MassPoint Legal and Strategy Advisory PLLC, we ask her about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on international sanctions and supply chains.

As part of our ‘Ask the Expert’ series, we ask Hdeel Abdelhady, Principal Attorney at MassPoint Legal and Strategy Advisory PLLC, about international sanctions, enforcement trends, and the role of lawyers as gatekeepers of the financial system.

As the current humanitarian crisis unfolds, how are governments adapting their sanctions regimes – and how can organisations keep up?

As part of our ‘Ask the Expert’ series, we ask Nicholas Turner, Of Counsel with Steptoe & Johnson in Hong Kong and author of the weekly Sanctions Top-5 blog, about the trends he’s seeing across the global sanctions landscape.

Regulators are getting serious about the quality of sanctions screening programmes. Institutions around the world need to be prepared, advises Sophie Lagouanelle, Head of Solutions at Accuity.

Versions of this article originally published in Global Banking & Finance Review and Trade Financing Matters. In the twelve months from January to December 2017, over 4,500 vessels in the container, bulker and tanker fleet completed 30,000 visits to OFAC sanctioned terminals (Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Sudan, Syria and the Crimea). Whilst not every vessel visit […]