What is Anti Money Laundering (AML)?

Anti Money Laundering (AML) is an effort to identify and thwart the flow of money generated through illegal activities. It encompasses a wide range of policies and legislation intended to force regulated businesses to adopt appropriate Client Due Diligence (CDD) and risk based monitoring, with the intention to identify, disrupt and report financial crimes.

The UK has a comprehensive and robust set of Money Laundering Regulations that are applicable to financial service providers, accountants, solicitors, estate agents and a number of other regulated sectors.

Know Your Customer

Businesses that are supervised under the Money Laundering Regulations have a legal duty to enforce adequate risk based controls against their clients to establish the following:

• That the client is who they say they are.
• The Identity of any beneficial owners.
• The identity of any corporate structures or individuals with significant control.
• To determine if the client is a Politically Exposed Person (PEP) or related to a PEP.
• To determine if the client is subject to Financial Sanctions.
• To determine any other risk factors that may result in the client using the company to facilitate fraud.
• To understand the nature of your client’s business and how they will be using your services.

This process is often referred to as Know Your Customer (KYC). It doesn’t stop at the point you onboard the client, additional risk-based monitoring should be performed routinely to identify changes in behaviour. The company must also establish a process to report suspicious activity to the nominated Money Laundering Reporting Officer (MLRO). If deemed necessary suspicions may also need to be reported to the relevant authority, in the UK this is the National Crime Agency (NCA).

Introducing MLVerify.com

QuickFile work alongside MLVeriy.com which provide AML Software for all types of regulated businesses. MLVerify.com allow you to build your own automated client screening procedures for requesting ID documents and gathering client information for risk assessment.

• Create custom requests for obtaining ID documents.
• Provide your clients with a dedicated upload area for document delivery.
• Integrates with Companies House for identifying company structure and beneficial ownership information.
• Run electronic identity checks against electoral register and credit reference data.
• Automatically cross-checks against PEP and Sanction data-sets.

If you’re an accountant or bookkeeper you can link your MLVerify.com account to Affinity to easily access existing Client Due Diligence data within Affinity or create new document requests.