Pros and Cons of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) in Cross Border money transfers Central bank digital currencies are digital tokens issued by a central bank that is comparable to bitcoin. They are based on the value of the country's fiat currency. CBDCs are being developed in several nations, and some have [...]
Benefits of Payment Pre-validation in Cross-border Transactions The financial messaging service provider, SWIFT, introduced a new financial service called Payment Pre-validation in July 2021 that improves cross-border real-time payment validation by minimizing frictions, verifying the information beforehand, and reducing the cost stemming from errors or misinformation. The real-time API-based system of Payment [...]
4 AML Trends to Follow Up in 2022 2021 was a challenging year for the financial industry in terms of the increasing threats of financial crimes and the expanding scope of the regulatory requirements. As a result, the focus of the regulatory bodies was on the Anti-Money Laundering (AML) compliance and how [...]
5 Scandalous AML Anti-Money Laundering Fines in 2021 The United Nations estimated that the cost of global money laundering annually is between $800 billion - $2 trillion which makes up 2-5% of global GDP. Unfortunately, only 1% of the money laundered can be detected and acted upon by the authorities. In order to [...]
Opportunities and Challenges of New Technologies for AML/CFT The new and innovative methods, procedures and technologies are being developed constantly for the purpose of the successful, effective and up-to-date implementation of AML (Anti-Money Laundering) and CFT (Combatting the Financing of Terrorism) requirements. Recently, on November 26th, 2021 I was a panel speaker for [...]
Sibos 2021 Highlights SIBOS is the world’s premier financial services event hold by SWIFT where the global financial community comes together each year to hold annually to identify the trends in the payments industry, to visualize the future of cross-border payments and to keep up with the most recent innovative solutions such as AI [...]
UAE KYC Blockchain Consortium When and why was the platform founded? The initiative of the UAE KYC (Know Your Customer) Blockchain Platform was launched in February 2020 by Dubai Economy (Dubai’s Department of Economic Development) together with its founding partner banks. The main motivation behind its foundation is to create a national ecosystem [...]
SWIFT Customer Security Programme What is the Customer Security Program (CSP)? Â In 2016, the biggest robbery in the banking history was organized by cyber attackers by breaking into the system of the Bangladesh Central Bank. The total amount of transaction instructions was $951M and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York processed the [...]
5 Things That Cryptocurrencies Should Know for Anti-Money Laundering ComplianceThe whitepaper of “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” by Satoshi Nakamoto which was published in October 2008 introduced a secure electronic payment system via which the users can transfer values to each other without a need to an intermediary party or a financial institution for [...]
Payments Landscape and the Upcoming ISO 20022 Standard Current Payment Channels High-value payments (RTGS) Together with the invention of the telegraph in the end of 19th century, wires have started to be used in the communication industry although they have not become mainstream until the beginning of the 20th century. With wires becoming widely [...]
