On 3 October 2024, the three European Supervisory Authorities: the European Banking Authority (EBA), the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA) and the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) are organising their 11th Consumer Protection Day. The theme of the event will be “Empowering EU consumers: fair access to the future of financial services”.

We are carrying out a survey of financial institutions to understand how they use RegTech solutions to comply with their legal and regulatory obligations, including in relation to AML/CFT. We will use responses to this survey to map activity in this area, identify barriers and risks related to the use of RegTech solutions and assess what we can do to facilitate the adoption and scaling up of RegTech solutions across the EU.

We are particularly interested in responses from financial institutions that are using, or are in the process of developing, RegTech solutions to monitor business relationships or transactions for AML/CFT purposes. We would also like to hear from ICT third party providers that are offering or developing such solutions.

In July, we launched a public consultation on changes to our Guidelines on internal governance. Our proposed amendments reflect new provisions in the CRDV and IFD, and include guidance on the steps institutions should take to ensure that ML/TF risks are addressed as part of their internal governance arrangements and risk management frameworks.

In July, we launched a public consultation on changes to the joint EBA/ESMA Guidelines on the assessment of the suitability of members of the management body and key function holders of credit institutions, financial and mixed financial holding companies and investment firms. The revised guidelines set out how competent authorities and institutions should take into account ML/TF risks when assessing a person’s fitness and propriety at application, and on an ongoing basis where they have reasonable grounds to suspect that an institution has been involved in ML/TF.

The public consultation is open until 31 October 2020.

The EBA is consulting on changes to the ML/TF Risk Factors Guidelines.

The Commission has issued a call for advice to the EBA on the future AML/CFT legal framework. We are now working with competent authorities to identify which aspects of the AML Directive should be harmonised or strengthened, and how the future AML/CFT law should interact with other relevant legislation. The Commission has asked us to respond by 10 September 2020.