Lavagem de dinheiro em instituições financeiras: impactos do Open Banking

Abstract

One of the most efficient strategies to fight organized crime is Follow the money, since money is the soul of any criminal organization, and financial institutions are responsible for notifying public authorities whenever they become aware of suspicious operations. These sectors are characterized as gatekeepers, as Brazil adopts a compulsory collaboration system between the public and private sectors, in which professionals and entities working in sectors most used by criminals to hide resources must notify public authorities. The banking system has experienced a great impact from the mobility and digital convergence growth, imposing a new challenge on financial institutions regarding one of the most difficult activities to do online: making sure that the person on the other side of the network is really who they say they are. The specific regulation of Open Banking will serve as an incentive for major players in the sector to seek partnerships with fintechs, or to develop public APIs that facilitate the integration of digital platforms to their systems – a new challenge for them, since these disruptions require a greater complexity of current regulations, and precisely because of their contemporaneity, it increases the difficulty of specifying relational risks, making the mission of creating and applying anti-washing standards even more difficult. Thus, the hypothesis that drives this study is: the sharing of bank data cannot weaken the "Know your customer" process. Also, we seek to detail the concepts and changes caused by Open Banking in Brazilian Financial System, the control and prevention methods of money laundering applied by Banking Institutions, and the impact that General Data Protection Law will have on sharing policy proposed by Open Banking. The present work was conducted as a field research, with an exploratory approach and a qualitative nature, seeking to identify risks and their mitigation, through the creation of a risk matrix and application of 5W2H method. It was noticed, after concluding the study, that the adoption of Open Banking, despite pursuing to simplify and reduce bureaucracy in financial system, will not have this impact on the analysis and detection process of any sign of money laundering. In contrast, it will require the adoption of additional measures of control. However, analyzing each one of the points of attention due to the implementation of Open Banking, we realize that none of the scenarios tend to make the current control procedures unfeasible, and attention must be paid to all the points detected and to necessary measures for their mitigation, in a way that the institution receiving registration data cannot be able to, at least initially, refrain from performing double verification measures to guarantee shared information veracity and integrity.