British Crypto Exchanges Present Hardly Any Risk for Illegal Financial Operations: FATF

Last week, the Financial Action Task Force, usually referred to as simply the FATF, released a report in which crypto exchanges of the UK were mentioned in a rather positive context.

No risk yet, but you can do better

The report says that crypto trading presents so-called emerging risks, but the watchdog has not found enough proof to state that these risks take place on Bitcoin exchanges.

Anyway, the FATF recommended that the UK government should do something to improve the rules of anti-money laundering in order to prevent terrorism financing. Also, this should help deal with any kind of potential risks.

The regulator recommends that the UK authorities keep working on gaining a better knowledge of emerging risks (i.e. crypto assets), increase the amount of data to analyze and, if necessary, conduct required activities.

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UK authorities’ response

The local regulators admit that there are certain internal risks and vulnerabilities due to the fact that virtual assets are decentralized and anonymous.

Therefore, the country intends to conduct crypto regulation for exchanges as part of introducing the EU’s fifth AML Directive and watch trades on exchanges between fiat and crypto coins. They will keep an eye on crypto wallet companies as well.

The upcoming global FATF guidance

This report came out now that the FATF is expected to release a guidance for global crypto regulation in June next year. This guidance will lay out the ways countries should regulate crypto exchanges, ICO-making companies and providers of crypto wallets.

This is a response to the call of G20 leaders who asked for measures of crypto regulation, AML and the opposing to financial terrorism that would be implemented by all countries in a coordinated manner.

Earlier this year, the US Treasury also urged the global community to consider more rigorous regulations of crypto assets.