News

The U.S. Treasury Department will clarify the customer due diligence obligations that financial institutions must observe when opening accounts for businesses, a department official told lawmakers Wednesday. "The absence of a general obligation to collect beneficial ownership information, along with the lack of a clear [customer due diligence] framework, has created some confusion and inconsistency across financial sectors," said Luke Bronin, deputy assistant secretary with the department's Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes, during testimony. That's because current customer due diligence (CDD) rules only require financial institutions to identify the beneficial owners of a company in "specific and narrow"...