About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

UK FSA Warns Will be Examining Firms’ Data Practices Around AML

Subscribe to our newsletter

The UK Financial Services Authority (FSA) has given the industry a heads up in its latest newsletter that it will be scrutinising firms’ systems and controls around anti-money laundering data, especially for politically exposed persons (PEPs), over the course of the next five months and going into next year. Details of the regulatory project are scant at the moment, but the regulator is bound to assess firms’ overall data management efforts to maintain this data in a timely manner.

As noted recently by WestLB’s executive director of operations control Sarah Feast and Royal Bank of Canada’s global head of reference data Julia Sutton, getting a handle on client data from across an organisation is far from a simple process. Both firms are working with a number of vendor partners in order to get their data into shape for incoming regulatory requirements and to meet current requirements in a more efficient and timely manner.

Given the FSA’s current bent towards heavy penalties for those it finds in non-compliance with regulations such as MiFID, firms can expect a heavy handed approach to be taken in regard to AML infractions also. Moreover, the regulator’s ability and intent to drill down to a much more granular level of data detail (as exhibited in its fining of BarCap last year for transaction reporting failures), should also be heeded.

The FSA has indicated, however, that the firms involved in the review have all now been contacted (you have been warned) and the results will be published in the first quarter of next year.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: Best practice approaches to data management for regulatory reporting

Effective regulatory reporting requires firms to manage vast amounts of data across multiple systems, regions, and regulatory jurisdictions. With increasing scrutiny from regulators and the rising complexity of financial instruments, the need for a streamlined and strategic approach to data management has never been greater. Financial institutions must ensure accuracy, consistency, and timeliness in their...

BLOG

T minus 17 and Counting: Anticipating Canada’s OTC Reporting Rewrite

With a little over two weeks remaining before Canada’s derivatives trade reporting rewrite comes into force on 25 July, market participants are finalising the broadest data governance uplift the domestic OTC market has ever seen. The year old amendments to Multilateral Instrument 96101 set a single compliance date for every province and territory and align...

EVENT

RegTech Summit New York

Now in its 9th year, the RegTech Summit in New York will bring together the RegTech ecosystem to explore how the North American capital markets financial industry can leverage technology to drive innovation, cut costs and support regulatory change.

GUIDE

Regulatory Data Handbook 2025 – Thirteenth Edition

Welcome to the thirteenth edition of A-Team Group’s Regulatory Data Handbook, a unique and practical guide to capital markets regulation, regulatory change, and the data and data management requirements of compliance across Europe, the UK, US and Asia-Pacific. This year’s edition lands at a moment of accelerating regulatory divergence and intensifying data focused supervision. Inside,...