PS24/17: Financial Crime Guide updates

Read PS24/17 (PDF)[1]

Why we are changing

Our changes to the Financial Crime Guide[2] are designed to make sure it remains a valuable resource for firms.

The changes aim to help firms:

• understand what we expect
• assess the adequacy of their financial crime systems and controls
• remedy deficiencies

We focused on areas where firms wanted additional guidance to clarify our expectations. The changes reflect insights from our supervisory work on financial crime and incorporate updates from our recent publications.

Who this is for  

This policy statement is relevant to:  

• all FCA financial crime supervised firms
• firms that we supervise under the Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing and Transfer of Funds (Information on the Payer) Regulations 2017 (MLRs), including cryptoasset businesses

The Guide will also be of interest to:  

• individuals and organisations working with firms subject to FCA financial crime and MLRs supervision
• financial services sector trade associations
• any other parties interested in FCA financial crime supervision; this could include non-governmental organisations working on financial crime prevention or academics

Next steps

Firms need to consider what adjustments may be needed to their financial crime systems and controls. This could include changes to internal policies, monitoring systems, training, governance or other elements of systems and controls.

We will continue to engage with firms following this publication and publish our findings. These may result in further changes to the Guide.

Background

In CP24/9: Financial Crime Guide updates[3] we consulted on proposed changes to the Guide relating to:

• sanctions
• proliferation financing
• transaction monitoring

We also proposed adding references to cryptoassets and the Consumer Duty, along with consequential changes such as data security and updating case studies.