By Dan Byrne for AMLi
A SIX-FIGURE PENALTY has been handed down to a money transfer company in Malta for “serious and systemic,” AML failures.
AWS Malta – trading publicly as Sendvalu and itself a subsidiary of a Swiss parent company with the same name – will pay €502,000 for multiple shortcomings that have landed it in hot water with the national FinCrime watchdog.
“Many of the failures have been considered by the Committee as serious and systemic,” said a statement from Malta’s Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit (FIAU).
They ranged from inadequate business risk assessment procedures, sub-par record keeping, the timing of customer due diligence, transaction monitoring tools that “failed to provide sufficient depth of information,” and mismanaged relationship management practices.
The FIAU also took issue with the firm’s customer risk assessment, which it said, “could not be overlooked,” despite attempts to improve it since the inspection process began.
“Despite the Company’s beliefs, that it only provides occasional transactions and does not hold any active business relationships with its customers, the Committee determined otherwise,” the statement read.
Overall, there were several instances of steps being taken to remedy the shortcomings, the FIAU acknowledged.
Examples included updates to the business and customer risk assessments that have either been planned or have already begun, and the rollout of enhancements to its transaction monitoring processes.
However, none of these remedies were enough to avoid a €500k bill.
In particular, the FIAU warned that the AML failings were being compounded by other factors -increasing the amount of risk that the company was exposed to.
These included, “the high-risk business model of the Company’s operations, the jurisdictions to where the funds were being remitted, the inadequacy in establishing a concrete customer profile and in view of several transactions processed without the appropriate levels of inquiry, probing and scrutiny.”
In addition to the fine, the FIAU has direct AWS to develop and share a comprehensive action plan that will see many of the shortcomings addressed. If the company fails to do this within the agreed deadline, more fines are possible.
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