What better way to welcome spring with a trip to Dubai to support the Executive Office for Control & Non-Proliferation, who set up in collaboration with the Ministry of Economy, a summit on “The Role of the DNFBPs Sector in Fighting Financial Crimes.”
I witnessed true leadership and commitment to the fight against financial crime and proliferation finance.
Alongside an incredible panel of experts such as George Pearmain, Ahmad AlFalasi, Raed Rawashdeh, Kamal Abou Nasr, Abdulrahman Sharaf, Mohammad Abu Rahma, and others, I talked about the importance of Customer Due Diligence and what it looks like for DNFBPs, challenges faced when performing transaction monitoring. I moderated a panel on emerging issues where we also discussed compliance culture and risk based supervision.
With the next round of Mutual Evaluations coming and the amendments to IO3 and IO4 those conversations are timely. A few key takeaways that stood out to me:
- Call them what you like, gatekeepers or enablers, DNFBPs are on the frontline and need to be empowered to prevent money laundering, proliferation finance and terrorism financing.
- As an industry we still quite have not nailed how to have a conversation around our appetite to financial crime risk
- Practical best practice training and awareness across all DNFBPs should be sector-specific.
In terms of ‘what next’, I’m keen to know whether the industry will be increasingly looking at the following:
- Leveraging formal and informal best practice sharing channels is essential
- A culture of compliance should be measured and benchmarked
- Clear supervisory KPIs need to be developed to ensure we deliver IO3 effectively