EDD – Enhanced Due Diligence designates additional steps of examination and caution to identify the customers and confirm that their activities and funds are legitimate.
SDD – Simplified Due Diligence – means that it is not required for a business to apply the standard customer due diligence measures, where the business has reasonable grounds for believing that a customer falls into the relevant categories representing low risk for money laundering or terrorism financing.
PEP – Politically Exposed Persons (“PEPs”) are individuals who are or have been entrusted with prominent governmental / public functions.
FATF – Financial Action Task Force (www.fatf-gafi.org) is an independent inter-governmental body that develops and promotes policies to protect the global financial system against money laundering, terrorist financing and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
OFAC – Office of Foreign Assets Control – Is part of the U.S. Department of the Treasury. It is responsible for administering and enforcing trade and economic sanctions.
FCIS – Financial Crime Investigation Service – Financial Intelligence Unit (LT). The FCIS is the national central agency in UK that is responsible for the collection, collation, processing, analysis and dissemination of information with a view to combating money laundering and the funding of terrorism.
MFSA – Malta Financial Services Authority. The authority is the single regulator for financial services in Malta.
MONEYVAL – The Council of Europe Select Committee of Experts on the Evaluation of anti-Money Laundering Measures and the Financing of Terrorism
Tipping Off – Improper or illegal act of notifying a suspect that they are the subject of a Suspicious Activity / Transaction Report or is otherwise being investigated or pursued by the authorities.
Monitoring – An element of an institution’s anti-money laundering program in which customer activity is reviewed for unusual or suspicious patterns, trends or outlying transactions that do not fit a normal pattern. Transactions are often monitored using software that weighs the activity against a threshold of what is deemed “normal and expected” for the customer.
Risk-Based Approach – The assessment of the varying risks associated with different types of businesses, customers, accounts and transactions in order to maximise the effectiveness of an anti-money laundering program.
UBO – ‘Ultimate Beneficial owner’ means any natural person(s) who ultimately owns and consequently controls or directs the customer and/or the natural person(s) on whose behalf a transaction or activity is being conducted and includes at least.
SAR – A Suspicious Activity Report made by the MLRO to the FCIS regarding suspicious activity.
RBA – Risk-Based approach.