FATF want to tighten payment market monitoring

    In recent years, there has been a tightening of control over transfers in the electronic payment market, but representatives of the FATF Intergovernmental Group for the Development of Financial Measures against Money Laundering consider this to be insufficient.

    This week's FATF website published a document with recommendations on risk assessment as part of financial transfers. The main message is the assessment of operations with increased risk and risk criteria for the activities of bank payment agents. Unprotected companies and entrepreneurs with high capitalization, an audit opinion and working with translations within the country belong to them. Transactions with increased risk will also include transfers carried out with an increased commission.

    “In practice, FATF innovations will mean that market participants are advised to refuse to conduct high-risk operations or consider such operations suspicious, tighten their control and send notifications to the relevant authorities (Rosfinmonitoring), but at the same time there is a risk of increased attention of the regulator,” says the executive Director of the National Payment Council Association Maria Mikhailova to Kommersant representatives.


    Often, a problem in identification can arise during transfers from one natural person to another, if there is at least one non-resident among them. In the absence of access to such a database, payments are still carried out without entering customer information.

    Among the problems, experts note the ambiguous situation with the commissions - if the average market transfer fee is about 1-1.5%, then in the case of mobile transfers it often reaches 8-9%.

    But the main problem even for QIWI and other systems will remain payments from non-residents - they may not contain user data, and the FATF suggests calling such payments suspicious.

    “Clients who are not in the database are available services in volume for unidentified users,” the QIWI told Kommersant, without specifying this volume.


    Representatives of the payment system noted that these users do not include those who have previously been authenticated at the QIWI office or at one of the partners' outlets.

    WebMoney has long introduced mandatory user identification when making any payments. In the absence of the necessary data, users can enter them directly during the translation, after which they are checked with the database in real time. By analogy with WebMoney, the Yandex.Money payment service has also arrived.
    “The commission for transfers from a mobile phone account with the subsequent cash withdrawal is associated with a categorically higher cost for the mobile operator itself (the operator often pays for the replenishment of a mobile account without a commission). We will study the recommendations of the FATF, but we ourselves will be extremely attentive to the security of payments of our customers, and the company complies with everything that is prescribed by law, ”the VimpelCom (Beeline) press service told Kommersant.


    In general, FATF recommendations can complicate the process of transferring funds between users. But it will be possible to assess the consequences only after the publication of the first bills written on the basis of these recommendations. At the moment, the Central Bank and Rosfinmonitoring do not comment on published recommendations and do not plan to automatically implement the proposed changes.

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