Bank Negara Malaysia Regulatory Requirement Compliance Solution

Aug. 16, 2007 - PRLog -- Bank Negara Malaysia under the Anti-Money Laundering Act 2001 (AMLA), issued revised AML/CFT Guidelines in November 2006 to the banking & insurance institutions. These revised AML/CFT Guidelines are in line with the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering (FATF)’s 40+9 Recommendations. These revised guidelines place significant emphasis on effective oversight by the Board of Directors to ensure that the policies and procedures adopted by the financial institutions in Malaysia are in compliance with the AMLA and the related regulatory requirements.

Thus far, the Attorney-General’s Chambers of Malaysia has prosecuted 21 money laundering cases, of which two cases were convicted in 2005 and 2007 respectively. The other 19 cases are at various stages of prosecution. These cases involved a 738 charges of money laundering offences with total amount of RM262.1 million.

The extension of the AMLA provision has been undertaken in two stages beginning with the invocation of the reporting of suspicious transactions, followed by the remaining provisions under Part IV of the AMLA that deal with Customer Due Diligence (CDD) and Compliance programme.

Cash threshold reporting (CTR) requirement of RM50,000 and above in a day was invoked in September 2006. The invocation of the CTR complements the mandatory legal obligation imposed on banking institutions and other categories of reporting institutions to submit suspicious transaction reports (STR) to the financial intelligence conducted by Bank Negara Malaysia.

Constantly changing as well as tightening anti-money laundering regulations not only in Malaysia but across the other countries, makes it essential for financial institutions to put in place automated compliance processes to avoid financial and legal consequences in the short run. If left unattended, these compliance issues, could affect your institution’s reputation, and in some cases lead to imposition of hefty penalties in your own country and as well foreign territories.

To meet these AML/CFT related regulatory and compliance requirements, we have built a compliance automation solution (FSP-KAT), core of which is architected around FATF’s 40+9 recommendations. This AML/CFT compliance solution can be easily adapted to Bank Negara Malaysia’s reporting requirements for submissions of CTRs & STRs and finally snap-fitted to your institutions existing processes.