Banks are the gatekeepers of the financial system, acting as the crucial access point to financial and payment services. As such, they are by far the largest contributors of suspicious activity/transaction reports to public authorities. With this in mind, a trade body called the European Banking Federation has set out its plan to help the European Union fight money laundering.

On the subject of clashes between the Money Laundering Directives and the General Data Protection Regulation, the EBF notes that it is unclear about the degree to which firms can rely on ‘legitimate interests’ (see GDPR Article 6(1)(f)) to share AML intelligence with each other.

At one point the EBF seems to call for the informal blacklisting of HNW clients.

"Banks would welcome being able to share between regulated entities, at a minimum within Europe, a list of clients with whom relationships have been terminated or who have been refused banking services based on specific financial crime reasons."

At another point the EBF indulges in a pure fantasy: "The EBF fully supports the principles of data protection and privacy that safeguard the protection of customer data, therefore ensuring trust towards regulated financial entities." In fact the EU's General Data Protection Regulation ensures nothing of the kind; banks are widely distrusted throughout the EU and have been ever since 2008.

The EBF likes the idea of banks sharing their transactional data with each other by means of a trustworthy network run by a separate organisation at arm's length. In Holland, the biggest banks (under the direction of various government departments) have been persuaded to collaborate with each other to create "the first shared transaction monitoring utility on payment data." This mechanism is still being tested. It aims to cross-check transaction data between the different databases of the participating banks, identifying criminal patterns without those banks having access to the data of each others’ clients. The platform is called the Transaction Monitoring Netherlands (TMNL) and it sits on top of each bank’s know-your-customer (KYC) reporting systems.

The EBF believes that the sharing of aggregated data with the objective of fighting against criminals 'should' be possible under existing laws, including the GDPR. The exchange of operational data is, however, only possible at this stage in the field of terrorist finance or where national public-private partnerships have supplemented EU law with national legal 'gateways.' The EBF wants to see this change.

UBO data

Another bugbear for the EBF is the poor quality of national registers of ultimate beneficial owners, the efficacy of which it wants public authorities to check. The fourth and fifth Money Laundering Directives force banks to report any discrepancies that they spot information about beneficial ownership held on public registers and their own information. The EBF thinks that this is not an efficient use of resources and it would be more effective if national authorities were to verify information about beneficial ownership themselves.