Emma RadmoreFCA has published its analysis of firm’s financial crime reports from 2017-2020. Over the period, it received over 5,500 reports from over 2,300 different firms. Among FCA’s key observations were:
- 111,000 PEP customers in 2017/18, but 89,000 in each subsequent year, which FCA thinks is in part due to changes to its guidance to exclude reporting of certain domestic customers as PEPs;
- the majority of the 180 submissions reporting non-EEA correspondent banking relationships were from wholesale financial markets;
- retail banks reported nearly 400,000 high risk customers in 2019/20 (almost half the total reported);
- over the period SARs increased by 22% from 2017/18 levels, to 480,000 in 2019/20 – the figures include internal SARs, and 3 firms accounted for the lion’s share of both internal and external SARs;
- use of automated sanctions screening is increasing year on year, but the investment management sector is falling behind;
- the number of staff in financial crime roles is increasing;
- over 1,000 firms use introducers, with over 1m relationships in total; and
- the number of customers who were exited for financial crime reasons in 2019/20 (761,000) was more than double the figure 3 years ago.
