According to a new survey reported in The Times, as many as 50% of British law firms do not have clarity regarding “the threat posed to them by criminals looking to launder dirty money in the UK”.
The central issue appears to be the lack of understanding of the ways in which criminals target law firms to launder ill-gotten gains. “One in three firms said this failure was due to the rapidly changing techniques used to find and exploit gaps in anti-money-laundering regulations”, The Times reports.
There is no doubt that regulators’ attention to money laundering, financing of terrorism and financial criminal practices has grown exponentially in recent years. As criminals constantly come up with new tactics, regulations are expanding into more and more sectors to keep up.
Because of its unique nature, the Legal Industry has become a central focus of regulators in the fight against dirty money. As a result, the industry as a whole appears in need of new strategies and tools to face the challenges of the new regulatory environment. As law firms are now required to comply with increasingly stringent know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) requirements, a traditional approach is not effective nor economically viable.
Can technology and automation make things better? At Know Your Customer, we believe the answer is yes.
Our vast range of digital solutions enables legal firms to simplify their approach to KYC/AML compliance and replace time-consuming manual processes with highly effective digital solutions.
Through the power of automation, our technology protects legal organisations from potentially high-risk customers and hefty regulatory fines, checking individuals and corporate entities against global crime watch lists and automatically identifying corporate clients’ ultimate beneficial owners.
If you’d like to discuss how you can better protect your law firm against the risks connected to money laundering, contact us here.
Last updated on May 9th, 2023 at 09:48 pm
