The Guernsey Government and Financial Services Commission are consulting interested parties about their proposals to bring their anti-money-laundering rules into line with the wishes of the Financial Action Task Force. "Additional customer due diligence" is to apply to all private banking services.

Apart from their desire to obey all the rules that the FATF issued in 2012, the island authorities want to conform to the wishes of MONEYVAL (the European FSRB or FATF-style regional body) which published the results of its "mutual evaluation" of Guernsey in January last year.

They want their efforts against terrorist finance to receive more international recognition and the document therefore refers to one business risk assessment for money laundering and one for terrorist finance. Both assessments can be included in one document (as is the case now) but they maintain that "internationally, AML/CFT often seems to mean a focus on ML to the detriment of FT and it is important to take every opportunity to demonstrate that Guernsey is focusing on CFT as well as AML."

It is proposed that "additional customer due diligence" should be required automatically in relation to:

• the provision of private banking services;
• a customer who is not a resident of Guernsey;
• a customer which is a legal person or legal arrangement used for personal asset holding purposes; and
• a customer who is a company with nominee shareholders or that issues shares in bearer form.