From This Year, Virtual Assets Also Subject to Money Laundering Risk Assessment

FIU to Hold Anti-Money Laundering Compliance Evaluation Briefing for Three Days from the 17th
This Year’s Evaluation Includes Asset Management, Loan Businesses, and P2P Operators

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[Asia Economy Reporter Ji Yeon-jin] Virtual asset operators will undergo their first Anti-Money Laundering (AML) compliance evaluation this year. The AML compliance evaluation system is conducted by the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) to assess the money laundering risks and management levels of financial companies. This year, 5,115 financial companies, including virtual asset operators, electronic finance businesses, lending businesses, and peer-to-peer (P2P) online investment finance operators, are subject to evaluation.

On the 16th, FIU announced that it has revamped the AML compliance evaluation method by developing evaluation indicators tailored to the financial transaction characteristics of each industry sector, for electronic finance operators, lending businesses, virtual asset operators, and P2P operators who are obligated to comply with AML this year. FIU will hold briefing sessions for these financial companies over three days starting from the 17th.

Starting this year, the exposure level to money laundering risks and management levels will be evaluated by industry sector, and the evaluation results will be graded into four levels and communicated to each individual company. Previously, rankings were assigned based on the evaluation results.

Additionally, to ensure the reliability of evaluation data from financial companies, FIU will request supporting documents for any abnormal values such as excessive performance entries among the evaluation data input by each financial company, and plans to conduct on-site inspections for companies whose supporting documents are deemed inadequate.

Furthermore, the compliance evaluation is divided into risk management evaluations reflecting the business characteristics of each industry sector (quarterly, within-sector comparison) and comprehensive evaluations reflecting common factors across all sectors (annual evaluation, overall comparison), and the comprehensive evaluation indicators have been revised to be selected from the quarterly risk evaluation indicators.

As a result, financial companies do not need to enter separate data for the comprehensive evaluation, and FIU can compare evaluation results both between and within industry sectors.