Welcome to Acuminor ‘s seminar – The unintended consequence of terrorist financing controls on NPO’s
Listen to our senior intelligence analyst, Mara Wesseling, talking about the de-risking of NPOs from a terrorism financing perspective.
The United States Department of the Army have declared August as Anti-Terrorism Awareness Month and the United Nations recognise August 21st as the International Day of Remembrance and Tribute to the victims of Terrorism.
An unintended consequence of AML/CTF legislation is the unnecessary de-risking of legitimate Non-Profit Organisations (NPOs), especially those that deliver humanitarian aid to conflict areas of high-risk countries.
Despite garnering the attention of international organisations such as the FATF and of public and private stakeholders across the compliance sector, de-risking of NPOs is still a live issue. Many banks and financial service providers taken an overly simplistic approach to NPOs, placing them all in a high-risk category. Attempts to classify NPOs have been un-nuanced and have not significantly improved the situation.
Too often, NPOs are facing obstacles to accessing bank accounts and making transactions, which means their daily work is a lot harder. They are often forced to ‘game the system’ by avoiding trigger words. For example, they may change the charity purpose to ‘aid for schools in Africa’ instead of ‘aid for schools in Uganda’ or avoid the words such as ‘Gaza’ in wire transfers to projects in the Palestinian Authority.
At Acuminor, we believe there must be a better solution. At this seminar, we will take a look at the solutions that are currently being proposed to improve de-risking of NPOs and look at how, with the help of tech, further improvements can be made.