The Central Bank will wash itself with the digital ruble

Deputies introduced a bill regulating the fight against money laundering in transactions with digital rubles. As a result, the Central Bank, where such accounts will be opened, will have to experience first-hand all the innovations that the regulator itself has introduced in this direction. Market participants assume that the Central Bank will try to shift some of the tasks to banks. But they hope that as a result, “the long-overdue optimization of AML/CFT operations” will also be activated.

At the end of last week, a bill was introduced to the State Duma regulating the fight against money laundering (AML/CFT) in transactions with digital rubles. As stated in the explanatory note, “the main “anti-legalization” functionality will be assigned to the platform operator (Bank of Russia).” This means that the regulator appoints an official responsible for implementing anti-money laundering policies in transactions with digital rubles, checks companies and citizens opening digital accounts for the likelihood of the risks of them committing suspicious transactions, and so on.

But banks, which will only act as intermediaries in transactions with digital rubles, will not be left out of the fight against money laundering. “The bill provides for a multi-level model for the implementation of anti-money laundering requirements, providing for the involvement of both credit institutions participating in the platform and the platform operator directly,” the document says. Credit institutions are required to identify client users of the platform, and the obligation to transfer their identification data to the platform operator is also established. The bill also provides for a new type of mandatory control for banks participating in the digital ruble platform, conditioned by the performance of transactions for crediting and debiting funds to and from the digital ruble account and, accordingly, debiting and crediting these funds from the client’s bank account or electronic wallet, the document says.

The Central Bank confirmed to Kommersant that they will have to carry out AML/CFT procedures in relation to transactions on the digital ruble platform: “We plan to automate these processes as much as possible and use artificial intelligence.”

But market participants fear that the regulator will try to transfer most of the AML/CFT operations with digital rubles to credit institutions. “The Central Bank will have to create an additional structure, the number of which is still difficult to estimate, but at the first stage this does not require a huge staff, while everything is in pilot,” says Alexey Voylukov, vice-president of the Association of Russian Banks. He emphasized that the bill already implies for banks “quite extensive obligations to send information to the Central Bank, including in response to requests.”

According to the head of the Association of Electronic Money and Transfer Market Participants, Viktor Dostov, the Central Bank will definitely transfer a number of functions, for example, primary client identification, to commercial banks, however, in accordance with the basic principles of FATF, the final responsibility still lies with the operator. “Undoubtedly, the practical participation of the Central Bank in AML/CFT activities will allow it to look at it from the perspective of the participants and, perhaps, will serve to improve regulation in this area as a whole,” believes Viktor Dostov.

The head of the Financial Innovations association, Roman Prokhorov, agrees with him: “The digital ruble project will allow the mega-regulator to partially immerse itself in the operational activities of the supervised ones and evaluate from their own experience all the delights of AML/CFT.” In his opinion, such experience of the regulator “will be useful in terms of implementing the long-overdue optimization of AML/CFT operations.” At the same time, Mr. Prokhorov believes, “for credit institutions immersed in this topic, the corresponding functionality for the digital ruble should not cause either significant problems or significant costs.”

Maxim Builov