AML Simplified

Money laundering & financing terror

At its core, money laundering is how criminals take illicit money like drug money and ‘clean it’ so its illegal origins are obscured. They feed it through the legitimate financial system so it comes out looking legit. The ultimate goal is to be able to safely invest or spend the money without linking themselves to the original crime.

Those who finance terrorism use similar techniques to transfer money to terrorist activities or support without being detected.

The International Context

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) is the global money laundering and terrorist financing watchdog. It's the inter-governmental body that sets international standards aiming to prevent laundering and terrorist financing and the harm they cause to society. It sets international policy in an effort to engender national legislative and regulatory reforms in member countries. The FATF has issued Recommendations that provide a comprehensive action plan to fight laundering and terrorist financing.

As a FATF member, New Zealand is required to implement these Recommendations. It does so by making certain businesses use protective and deterrent measures, including a Risk Assessment and a Compliance Programme.

Key NZ legislation

The Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act 2009 came into force in 2013. It originally required New Zealand’s financial institutions and casinos to detect and deter money laundering and terrorism financing.  Financial institutions are more than just the big banks and insurers, and included around 2,000 companies. Now, some non-financial businesses have also been rolled in. These are the law firms, accountants, real estate agents and a few others, taking the number of reporting entities under the DIA alone to 5,000 let alone the FMA and RBNZ entities on top.

The Act:

• builds on the historic obligations on financial institutions set out under the Financial Transactions Reporting Act 1996 to bring New Zealand into line with FATF’s Recommendations;
• requires businesses to guard against money laundering and terrorism financing; and
• aims to enhance the reputation of individual businesses, and of New Zealand as a safe place to do business.

The Act has teeth, ranging from intervention from the supervising bodies who can issue formal warnings, name and shame non-compliant businesses in the media, apply to the High Court to impose fines, enforceable undertakings and injunctions, all the way up to criminal prosecutions of companies and individuals.

The Regulators

There are three government regulators, known as the ‘Supervisors’. Each regulates a distinct group of business types:

1. The Reserve Bank supervises banks, life insurers and non-bank deposit takers.
2. The Financial Markets Authority supervises issuers of securities, licensed supervisors of managed funds, the fund managers, brokers and custodians, financial advisers, derivatives issuers, DIMS providers, peer-to-peer lending, and equity crowd-funding service providers.
3. The Department of Internal Affairs supervises all the other reporting entities. That comprises lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, casinos, money changers, money remitters, payroll providers, tax pooling providers, debt collectors, factoring providers, financial leasing providers, safe deposit box vaults, non-bank credit card providers, stored value card providers, cash transporters, non-bank non-deposit taking lenders, virtual asset service providers, high value dealers, trust and company services providers, the racing industry (Racing Industry Transition Agency formerly NZ Racing Board/TAB NZ) and others.

As well as the three Supervisers, another key government player is the New Zealand Police’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU). The FIU collates information about suspicious financial transactions and activities, international wire transfers, large cash transactions, suspected terrorist property, and border cash reports.