Regulating by stealth – GTOs in the private sector

Anti-money laundering (AML) regulation and compliance is now considered to be one of the key functions for organisations connected to financial services, and the data it produces often plays an important and recognised role within financial crime prevention. However, AML compliance requirements are slowly pervading into the rest of the business sector and continuing to affect the operational practices and costs centres of many non-financial services. It has been reported that many small-scale businesses and financial services are struggling to fund the administrative costs of implementing complex regulation, or they have had to face the option of reducing the type of service that they provide (Jiang, 2015). AML regulation is already a costly and time-consuming business for many larger private financial services including the banking sector, however the question that this article is keen to explore is whether this cost has now reached an unsustainable level.