Financial Regulators Release Bank Secrecy Act Guidance to Money Service Businesses

By Andrew Cochran

FinCEN and the federal banking agencies (FBAs) at the Federal Reserve System, the FDIC, the National Credit Union Administration, the OCC, and the Office of Thrift Supervision today issued interpretive guidance setting forth the minimum steps that banking organizations should take when providing banking services to money services businesses. FinCEN has issued a concurrent advisory to money services businesses to emphasize their Bank Secrecy Act regulatory obligations and to notify them of the types of information that they will be expected to produce to a banking organization in the course of opening or maintaining account relationships. FinCEN and the FBAs issued a joint press release on the guidance and the advisory. CT Blog regulars will recall last week's letter from the FBAs, which was in turn a reply to the January 10 letter from the American Bankers Association and state regulators on the consistency of BSA examinations. The new guidance was issued well ahead of the announced deadline and during the hearing today at the Senate Banking Committee on the regulators' oversight of MSB compliance with the BSA.

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