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Content type: Examples
In January 2019 the UK Home Office announced it would collaborate with France to overhaul its regime for suspicious activity reports in order to fight money laundering. In 2018, the number of SARs filed with the National Crime Agency rose by 10% to nearly 464,000. Banks, financial services, lawyers, accountants, and estate agents are all obliged to file SARs if they suspect a person or organisation is involved in money laundering, terrorist finance, or other suspicious activity. The system has…
Content type: Examples
After four years of negotiation, in 2017 Google began paying Mastercard millions of dollars for access to the latter's piles of transaction data as part of its "Stores Sales Measurement" service. Google, which claimed to have access to 70% of US credit and debit cards through partners, said that double-blind encryption prevents both partners from seeing the other's users' personally identifiable information. Mastercard said the company shares transaction trends with merchants and their service…
Content type: Examples
In December 2018, a report, "Access to Cash", written by the former financial ombusdsman Natalie Ceeney and independent from but paid for by the cash machine network operator Link, warned that the UK was at risk of sleepwalking into a cashless society and needed to protect an estimated 8 million people (17% of the British population) who would become disadvantaged as a result. Although cash used halved between 2007 and 2017, and debit cards passed cash in share of retail transactions in 2017,…
Content type: News & Analysis
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-the-nsa-spies-on-international-bank-transactions-a-922430.html*Update: The European Parliament has voted to recommend suspension of its Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP) agreement with the US. The vote in favour of suspension only highlights how the NSA’s reported activities have undermined the agreement. Negotiations should immediately commence to strengthen the privacy and redress provisions, to ensure that governments…
Content type: News & Analysis
Dear Mr Schrank,
I am writing with regard to the current controversy over the private arrangement between SWIFT and the U.S. Government that facilitates the extradition of confidential financial transaction data from SWIFT to U.S. authorities. You will be aware that Privacy International contends that this arrangement breaches privacy and data protection law, and we have lodged complaints with regulatory authorities in 38 countries.
In my many discussions with SWIFT officials over the past…