Germany Seeks to Expand Digital Efforts at FATF as It Takes On Watchdog’s Presidency
FATF (Hervé Cortinat/OECD)
Germany Seeks to Expand Digital Efforts at FATF as It Takes On Watchdog’s Presidency
The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), a global money laundering and terrorist financing watchdog, said it would prioritize strengthening its anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing efforts through digital transformation as new leadership gets under way.
- Dr. Marcus Pleyer, deputy director general in Germany’s Federal Ministry of Finance, took over as FATF president from Xiangmin Liu from China. Pleyer began his two-year term as president on July 1.
- In a recently published paper, Pleyer laid out the objectives for his term as head of the watchdog. The announcement said that under Germany’s leadership, the watchdog would continue to build on the anti-money laundering (AML) and counterterrorism financing (CTF) work done by the task force.
- The paper notes that the FATF has been monitoring the risks and opportunities presented by the digitisation of economies and plans to work towards ensuring that AML and CTF guidelines can be more efficiently implemented in the private sector.
- The FATF had also held a plenary meeting earlier in June in order to gauge the regulatory and industry progress in implementation of AML regulations for virtual assets.
- Pleyer’s paper also outlined some of the other objectives that the FATF will pursue: looking into connections between illegal wildlife trade and money laundering, tackling financial schemes associated with ethnically or racially motivated terrorism, and a new initiative to look into the financial flows of global migrant smuggling.
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