Banks asked to develop self-assessment process

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FE Report
The Bangladesh Bank (BB) has asked the commercial banks to develop self-assessment procedures to assess the anti-money laundering performance of their branches.
The directive came at a meeting of the central taskforce on anti-money laundering held at the conference room of the central bank Sunday with Executive Director of Bangladesh Bank (BB) Abul Quasem in the chair.
The central bank will issue a fresh directive in this connection shortly in line with the existing anti-money laundering guidelines, official sources said.
"We have asked the banks to assess the position of their each branch using the self-assessment procedures," a BB senior official told the FE Sunday after the meeting.
The meeting discussed various issues including suspicious transactions reporting (STR) and introduction of a uniform 'Know Your Customer (KYC)' form to help check illegal fund transfer through collecting required information from the banks.
Currently, banks are using different forms for preparing the KYC profiles on the basis of information, provided by the account holders to assess any financial risks of the clients.
Sources, however, said the central bank received 43 STRs from 48 scheduled banks during the June-September period of this year.
During the February-March period of this year, at least 26 STRs were submitted to the BB by the commercial banks.