SOUTH Africa’s big four banks have been fined R125m by the Reserve Bank for failing to have appropriate measures to ensure compliance with the provisions of the Financial Intelligence Centre Act (Fica).
Standard Bank was slammed with the highest financial penalty of R60m, FirstRand was hit with R30m, Nedbank R25m and Absa R10m.
Standard Bank was found to have failed to meet its obligations to report cash transactions above R24,999.99 to the financial intelligence centre. It was also criticised for slack controls for detecting property associated with terrorist activities.
The bank said in a statement it had taken “immediate remedial action to address the issues identified” and initiated a programme to address the findings.
Absa, FirstRand and Nedbank were also penalised for keeping inadequate customer verification details and transactional records.
In terms of Fica, the Reserve Bank is tasked to supervise and enforce compliance with Fica rules to ensure that banks have controls to deal with money laundering and combat the financing of terrorism.
However, the Reserve Bank said the fines did not mean that South Africa’s big four banks had in any way facilitated transactions involving money laundering and the financing of terrorism.
All the big-four banks were directed to take remedial action to address weaknesses when it comes to identifying and verifying customers’ details.
Earlier in the year, Standard Bank plc in the UK was hammered with a £7.6m fine by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority for failures in its money laundering controls and procedures over corporate customers connected to politically exposed persons.
Source: Business Day
No comments:
Post a Comment