Insurance Europe has responded to the European Banking Authority’s (EBA) consultation on proposed Regulatory Technical Standards (RTS) aimed at strengthening the EU’s anti-money laundering (AML) framework.
While welcoming the EBA’s push for a harmonised, data-driven risk assessment of obliged entities, Insurance Europe stresses that new reporting and data collection must be proportionate, building on existing practices and limited to what is really necessary for effective supervision.
The federation calls for revising the proposed data points to be collected to assess the inherent and residual risk profile of obliged entities in order to reduce burdens, especially for low-risk products. It urges a reasonable transition period exempting institutions from providing new data immediately to allow them to adapt their IT tools for the collection of such data.
Insurance Europe proposes more proportionate customer identification requirements and opposes excessive data collection requirements such as the customer’s city of birth or different nationalities. Such excessive requirements will be especially burdensome for customers to provide and for companies to collect, while hindering financial inclusion. The federation also advocates maintaining recognition of remote identification solutions for customers.
For simplified due diligence measures regarding low-risk business relationships, mainly in the context of low-risk life insurance products, Insurance Europe proposes to allow insurance companies to update their customers’ information on an event-driven basis, and urges the inclusion of pension products and pure risk policies in the list of financial products or services which should benefit from specific sectoral simplified due diligence measures.
Insurance Europe remains committed to working with European institutions to ensure the AML/CFT framework is effective, risk-based, and proportionate.