NEWS: The NCUA and other federal regulators, including the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) issued a joint statement yesterday to stress their “longstanding position” that banks and credit unions must take a risk-based approach to assessing individual customer relationships and conducting customer due diligence (CDD).
The statement emphasized that no single type of member should be considered uniformly higher risk. Banks and credit unions “are neither prohibited nor discouraged from providing banking services to customers of any specific class or type.”
“The agencies recognize that it is important for customers engaged in lawful activities to have access to financial services,” the statement said. It explained that banks and credit unions must adopt risk-based procedures for conducting CDD that enable them to:
- Understand the nature and purpose of customer relationships in the development of a customer risk profile, and
- Conduct ongoing monitoring to identify and report suspicious transactions and, on a risk basis, to maintain and update customer information.