Home › Trade Based Financial crimes News › GCFFC states its position on beneficial ownership transparency

GCFFC states its position on beneficial ownership transparency

By Mark Ford on September 6, 2021

All actors fighting financial crime should have instant access to high quality, highly usable beneficial ownership data according to the Global Coalition to Fight Financial Crime (GCFFC).

In a newly published position paper, GCFFC states its views on beneficial ownership transparency and its objectives to promote more effective information sharing between public and private entities.

The paper also proposes mechanisms to identify emerging threats and best practice approaches to more robust controls against money laundering.

Readily available data

Beneficial ownership data should be collated in a central register that is verifiable, up to date and historically maintained, structured and interoperable according to the coalition.

Banks, financial intelligence units and other actors can better analyse data in structured format by applying data science and machine learning techniques to identify suspicious patterns of ownership or beneficial owners that appear on other datasets of interest, such as sanctions lists.

When data is in a structured format and linked with other datasets it enhances the data’s utility to expose transnational networks of illicit financial flows and support effective and timely due diligence according to GCFFC.

Sanctions

Effective, proportionate, dissuasive, and enforceable sanctions should exist for non-compliance with disclosure requirements, including for non-submission, late submission, incomplete submission, or false submission the GCFFC says.

The coalition comprises different actors engaged in fighting financial crime, including law enforcement agencies, obliged legal entities and civil society organisations.

Beneficial ownership transparency Global Coalition to Fight Financial Crime position paper can be found here.