Despite distractions such as Bitcoin and other virtual currencies, the focus of banks' anti-money laundering compliance efforts should remain squarely on recent areas of regulatory concern such as customer due diligence, risk assessment and suspicious activity monitoring, a U.S. bank regulator said last week at a conference in Miami. "Deficiencies in those areas really are the drivers of enforcement actions. These are the areas you need to focus on," John Wagner, a top anti-money laundering (AML) compliance official with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), said during a panel at the Florida International Bankers Association conference. The potential for virtual currencies to be misused by money launderers has drawn a lot of attention as a new twist in the anti money-laundering fight. But Wagner stressed the AML basics in his remarks. Wagner added that there is a "critical interdependency" among due diligence, risk assessment, and monitoring in an AML compliance
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