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Two financial institutions have been served with formal warnings from authorities this month for failing to comply with anti-money laundering rules - but what does that mean in effect?
On Monday Sharesies was cited by the Financial Markets Authority for failing to complete identity verification for up to 7815 customers who had account balances of more than $1000 as part of standard customer due diligence.
And two weeks ago the Reserve Bank issued a formal warning to Westpac, saying its internal systems failed to detect and report almost 8000 corporate transactions to overseas recipients between July 2018 and February 2019.
But there's no suggestion either organisation is involved with actual money-laundering.
Dr Ron Pol is an outcomes scientist who's studied the effectiveness of AML policy and says it's a tick-box exercise with little impact on catching the crims - or preventing their crimes.
If you'd like to find out more, Ron has two websites: TeamFactors.com (outcomes science) and EffectiveAML.org (outcomes in AML context).
