Ensuring effective supervision and enforcement against money laundering

Investments in the reform on combating money laundering will be used:

• to improve the availability, processing, analysis and use of information (data) by each of the supervisory authorities
• to improve information exchange, information use and cooperation between the various authorities
• to enhance risk-based monitoring in the combating of money laundering to increase the risk of being caught
• to improve the potential for deploying warning examples and other enforcement measures
• to improve the capability of the Finnish competent authorities to prevent money laundering in Finland, and
• to boost the credibility of money laundering prevention measures in Finland in the international context.
• The financial markets and the money laundering undertaken on them are by their nature international, cross-border activities.

The purpose of the proposed changes to the monitoring system for bank accounts and payment accounts is to enhance the prevention, detection and prosecution of money laundering and terrorist financing. The current approach in Finland has been found to be expensive and complicated for both the competent authorities and the private sector, and in its current form it will not attain the targets envisioned when the system was designed, either in preventing money laundering and terrorist financing or in combating the grey economy.

Building a desktop for the supervisory authority for preventing money laundering is intended to make the data necessary for various monitoring measures readily available, to help form an overall picture of the risk assessment in respect of the subjects being monitored, and to facilitate the efficient and proportionate targeting of monitoring measures.

The purpose of the investment intended to make the register of beneficial owners more up-to-date, broader in coverage and more correct is to create a comprehensive, up-to-date and quality-confirmed register of beneficial owners to benefit enterprises, the authorities and the parties subject to notification obligations pursuant to the Money Laundering Act. Transparency of data on the beneficial owners of enterprises and corporations is a fundamental necessity for global regulation.

In the investment ‘Digitalisation of the investigation of money laundering’, the key targets are to ensure that the work of the Financial Intelligence Unit is based on correct, up-do-date and comprehensive source data and that the investigations are undertaken using methods enabling the processing of increasing quantities of data. Another target is to ensure that these efforts will be increasingly driven by target-based and phenomenon-based actions rather than processing individual notifications and aimed at activities with societal significance and impact in terms of criminal investigation.

The purpose of the investment to maintain and update the national risk assessment on money laundering and terrorist financing is to deliver an information platform and a risk assessment tool. The information platform will ensure that the data are updateable, shorten the time required for drawing up a national risk assessment and enable the maintaining of a national situational picture and statistical data. The purpose of the risk analysis tool is to harmonise risk assessments and to ensure the comparability of the risks and risk levels identified in national risk assessments completed at various times.

Within this reform there has been a requirement for required legislative changes for two legal frameworks:

• Trade Register Act (129/1979)
• Act on the Bank and Payment Accounts Control System (571/2019)

The absolutely required minimum legislative changes for digitalisation RRP/RRF-reform has been carried out in success and are now applicable legislation since the 564/2023 replacing the 129/1979 and the amended 579/2019 has entered into force.

The total contribution of funding share for the financing portion of the reform and all its investments has been evaluated at the start to be approximately EUR 19,9 million, out of which were originally intended to have EUR 12,1215 million as RRF sourced funding, but which were at the finalisation stages changed for at least EUR 10 million RRF allocation.