Managing geographic risk: Beyond the FATF lists

Recent changes to the UK Money Laundering Regulations mean that FATF grey-listed countries no longer automatically trigger enhanced due diligence.

But this change doesn’t mean that expectations have been lowered when it comes to geographic risk. Instead, it places greater emphasis on firms making, and being able to defend, their own risk-based judgements.

So if the regulations no longer tell you which countries are “high risk”, how should you assess geographic risk?

Join FINTRAIL for a practical discussion on:

• What the recent MLR changes mean in practice
• Why FATF lists alone have never been enough to assess geographic risk
• Common weaknesses in country risk methodologies, from arbitrary scoring and weightings to over-reliance on limited external indices
• What a proportionate, evidence-based geographic risk methodology looks like
• How to distinguish between different types of geographic risk across money laundering, terrorist financing, sanctions, proliferation financing and bribery and corruption
• How country risk should translate into meaningful customer and transaction-level controls