CIFSA highlights Anti-Money Laundering Strengths of Cayman
The Cayman Islands Financial Services Association (CIFSA) has recently suggested that although Cayman’s service providers and the Regulatory Authority takes many efforts to fight money laundering, certain international financial centres fail to recognise the anti-money laundering regime of the Cayman Islands.
As the body promoting Cayman as a quality international financial services centre, CIFSA meant a recent article in the Cayman Observer newspaper. The article reported that efforts to gain a competitive edge in such jurisdictions as Dubai, Bermuda and Dublin have resulted in difficulties that attracted outsourced funds business from Cayman.
According to CIFSA, without the recognition of the jurisdiction’s anti-money laundering regime, service providers have to complete additional due diligence routine providing an extra regulatory hurdle, while administrators in cayman are outsourcing administrative work to counterparts in other jurisdictions.
Eduardo Silva, chairman of CIFSA, observed that this situation is hard to understand as Cayman’s anti-money laundering framework is among the strongest in the world and it is even more robust than in many onshore territories. Silva said that when the regulations were introduced internationally “they were universally to be applied retroactively”. He added that “Unlike the US and the UK, who considered the exercise not to be too costly, the Cayman Islands complied and undertook the ‘know your customer’ exercise throughout the industry at considerable expense to the service providersâ€.
CIFSA suggests that jurisdictions which have recognised Cayman’s anti-money laundering framework as equivalent to their own (for example, Jersey) have seen business grow between the 2 countries, which will further increase as Cayman’s market takes a leading position in the hedge funds sector.
Jersey’s recognition of Cayman Islands’ regime means that it considers Cayman’s framework to be equivalent to its own and the other countries on its list. The list includes Gibraltar, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Singapore, Japan, the US, and all the major developed European nations.