Search results

The purpose of this article is to analyse financial intelligence units' (FIUs') approaches in enforcing compliance and how these units can ensure the application of the most effective enforcement mechanism to secure the best outcome of such regulatory action.

Sources of information consisted of scholarly books, papers and published articles through the web.

FIUs should not concentrate on adopting a purely cooperative style (in terms of soft sanctions) or take the opposite approach and be a tough regulator (applying harsh sanctions on non‐compliant reporting entities). Rather, a more qualitative approach should be adopted, individually tailoring the approach on the basis of an examination of the FIUs' findings on entity non‐compliance, and how it can best operate its mechanism so as to ensure those entities comply effectively with their AML/CTF obligations.

This article serves as a fruitful analysis to educate FIUs' personnel, AML/CTF professionals, and reporting entities in terms of achieving the highest level of compliance with AML/CTF laws and regulation. Some studies have discussed FIU enforcement mechanisms generally but, to the best of the author's knowledge, the analytical study of different FIUs' enforcement mechanisms and how to achieve the most effective results to secure compliance is yet to be externally or independently researched and evaluated.

This study aims to evaluate the suspicious transaction reporting (STR) as a financial intelligence tool to identify the potential strengths and limitations of STR and to come up with the criteria, which will make this tool an effective one in early detection of terrorist financing activities.

Considering the research aim, this research uses the funnelling method for identifying effectiveness criteria. Funnelling is a method of literature review that helps find pertinent literature by refining the search through filtering the available research (Ridley, 2008). Using this method, the researcher first applied the criteria of actionable intelligence to filter the financial intelligence tools to select the most promising and important tool (suspicious transaction reporting) for early detection of terrorist financing activities. The funnelling method was also applied to derive the effectiveness criteria from the operational features, and corresponding limitations, of the suspicious transaction reporting system. The funnelling method was also used to identify those operational features and limitations of suspicious transaction reporting that have the most direct relevance to the early detection problem of suspicious transaction reporting.

There are some operational features of STR that give rise to certain limitations that undermine its effectiveness in terms of early detection of terrorist financing activities. The limitations of STR necessitate a search for criteria that will make STR effective in early detection of terrorist financing activities. Based on the operational features and their corresponding limitations, effectiveness criteria for STR have been derived in this study. It is shown how these effectiveness criteria can remove the limitations of STR.

The list of operational features and the corresponding limitations based on which the effectiveness criteria have been derived may not be exhaustive. There may have other operational features, and corresponding limitations that also make STR largely ineffective in the early detection of terrorist financing activities, and for which more effectiveness criteria should also be derived.

The limitations and the effectiveness criteria will pave the way for redesigning STR in such a way that will make it highly useful for detecting financing activities relating to imminent terrorist attacks.

The society will experience fewer terrorist attacks that will make the society peaceful, happy and vibrant.

In this study, the effectiveness criteria of STR for early detection of terrorist financing activities have been derived in an innovative way by deducing them from the operational features of STR and the corresponding limitations.