Elevate your Compliance with Intelect Group. Our monthly round up of news items which are of particular relevance to those businesses regulated for the purposes of Anti-Money Laundering.
We prevent bad things happening to good people and their businesses.
Cyber Security

IBM Cost of a Data Breach 2024
The annual IBM analysis, ‘Cost of a Data Breach’ of 604 organisations finds the average cost of each breach, including lost revenue, has now reached $4.88 million (a 10% increase on the previous year).
Other findings include that 70% of breached organisations reported that they suffered significant or very significant disruption as a result. Worryingly 40% of data breaches were found to involve data stored across multiple cloud services.
Have you risk assessed your cyber security?
Financial Crime

Nigeria emerging as an international money laundering hub?
Interpol has disclosed that every hour, hundreds of thousands of dollars are being laundered out of Nigeria across the world.
The announcement made at a recent conference in Nigeria followed a global law enforcement operation targeting West African organised crime groups, which led to hundreds of arrests, the seizure of assets and the dismantling of numerous criminal networks across the world.
Operation Jackal III, which ran from 10 April to 3 July across 21 countries on five continents, targeted online financial fraud and the West African syndicates behind it.
Bear this in mind when conducting any business risk assessments that have a connection to Nigeria.
Regulatory

SRA hit law firm with one of their biggest fines so far
The Solicitors Regulatory Authority has levied one of their biggest fines to date for a law firms AML failures.
Coventry firm, Band Hatton Button (BHB) were fined £46,000 for failing to have proper anti-money laundering (AML) procedures in place. BHB is an alternative business structure, this allowed the SRA to increase the £25,000 limit applied to traditional law firms.
It is reported that between June 2017 and February 2018, BHB did not have a firm-wide risk assessment (FWRA), and then the one it put in place was not compliant with the money laundering regulations.
A reminder that without AML policies, procedures and processes your regulated business is exposed, if you wait for an inspection, it’s already too late.