At Capx:
The way to defeat ISIS is to make sure that we’ve all got to pay more for our euros when we go on our summer jollies to the beaches. This must be so because this is the solution that the government has engineered and we all know that governments gets things like regulation right, don’t we?
The cause of all of this is the knickers twisted over the manner in which some few people transfer money to bad people: to the terrorists in part.
MLR shouldn’t be expensive and most of it is in house and based on common sense.
It’s easy to get the right info if the other party is above board. If someone propositions you and offers you ten times the fees, then you may want to take the cash and hope for the best, but should you?
Even if the charge is expensive, would you start that business if you couldn’t cover it? It would be a poor businessman that couldn’t see that risk.
I uspect it has more to do with slipping some offensive and expensive anti tax evasion stuff under the guise of a security measure.
Lying bastards.
Arnald,
Where does using in-house resources not have both actual and opportunity costs?
That’s the point. Innovative businesses (which would make us all that little bit richer) either won’t get started or will rapidly fail, because of the high costs caused by regulation.
Arnald wins the “kiss the state’s arse ” prize yet again. Expected but lacks the element of surprise.
Eggsy
I can counter that by saying that you’re an apologist for ISIS, you want them to succeed in toppling all states and you want the method of funding to be unimpeded.
Like the cock you are.
@Arnald,
The cost of doing a Paris is trivial. Pocket money. You don’t even have to pay the attackers because they’re doing it for the raisins.
That isn’t something that more intense scrutiny is going to stop. At best it will mean a bit more cash transacting – which with Schengenland’s eastern border currently wide open all the way to Afghanistan, isn’t going to pose a problem to the terrorists.
And as always there will be the 2nd and higher order effects.
The cost of remittances has just gone up making people in some of the poorest parts of the world poorer and less likely to get an education. Poor, uneducated, people are more likely to live in and remain in cultures that subjugate women and be easier fodder for the likes of ISIS.
So who is winning?
Well welcome to the age of the masked riot cop sprouting everywhere in your town.
“Well welcome to the age of the masked riot cop sprouting everywhere in your town.”
Ah the joys of diversity and multiculturalism. The gift that never stops giving.
I understand currency exchange is big business (in fact, the arbitrage between buy and sell that you see in the Post Office seems positively criminal these days.)
I’d just like to make a point though – I’ve been living between jurisdictions for the best part of my adult life, and there are several firms which are super competitive. I used to use HiFx.com (who give you close to FX.com rates), but I’ve found myself more recently using CurrencyFair.com – with CurrencyFair basically being a Betfair style FX exchange, with the spread being something like 1.425-1.426 euro to the pound (based on my transfer yesterday) – and you can buy or sell either side, of course.
So yeah, I kinda get what this article says (and maybe it’s talking about bigger players than the 6 figures liquidity available either side on CurrencyFair at any one time), but the consumer options for currency exchange have been getting much more competitive of late, in my experience.
AML is about tax evasion, not terrorism, drugs or human trafficking. That’s the beginning, middle and end of it. You could be raping a 14 year-old Vietnamese nail-salon worker while wearing a bomb belt and ripped to the tits on primo Columbian gak and the powers that be couldn’t give a fuck. But woe betide you if you try to fiddle your tax form. They’ll send a fucking Marine Expeditionary Force.
You’re wrong, BiCR.
AML is about legitimising the proceeds of crime. The finance operations of terrorist organisation will be vast and complicated. They need to convert the drugs/pros/extortion cash somehow. It’s becoming easier to do through the global system rather than relying on cash-heavy shop fronts.
Once the cash is legitimised then they are likely to pay whatever tax on it because otherwise it would stick out.
Tax evasion, as a function of real world criminality, is a by-product.
In theory, it would be about proceeds of crime.
But as usual, because in reality agents of the state are not the geniuses you think they are, they go for the easy targets, ie us, and make our lives more difficult without making the slightest bit of difference, or at worst at the margin, to the business of those against which those things were directed against to start with.
JohnM
You’re joking aren’t you ? The police are nowhere to be found in our entire district.
Arnald
AML and KYC and all that box ticking regulation costs a fortune. We have spent literally hundreds of millions on it, while closing down desks left, right & centre that used to make a profit before they regulated the crap out of it. And I’m not talking the risky stuff, this is just solid, transactional business that now costs more to operate than can be made out of it. So we don’t do it any more.
When the “penalise, regulate, exterminate” frenzy is over, people will long for the days when financial services were cheap and the companies and jobs contributed shed loads of tax to the economy. The City is dying a death by a thousand cuts and nobody seems to care that we are systematically killing our one outstanding industry.
CU
That’ll be CDD now, not KYC? Anyway, i’s only costing a fortune now because it was never done in the first place. Once the infrastructure is in place it costs a lot less. Compliance teams have been woefully under-manned and under-trained for those jobs that shouldn’t take them long (PEP searches, IFA vetting etc) and especially if you’re a broker or introducer heavy service provider, then the paperwork ought to be a doddle.
Some of the very well paid Compliance Managers in Guernsey think they’ve done their job by playing a round of golf with someone who comes from Russia or Dubai. Even the legal firms are suddenly finding out massive holes in their data and have been breaching regulations for years and years.
This is a major part of the industry’s crocodile tears when it comes to introducing anything whatsoever. It thrives on the fast and loose deals.
The finance industry has been lording it up for decades or so, constantly raising fees and getting away with illogical returns in buoyant markets.
Like all industries, they can’t live forever. Finance was always a sand-builder.
I work in Compliance IT. Our surveillance systems cost a fortune and they don’t actually catch anybody. Not because they’re not any good – we’ve proven that they are – but because there’s a *vanishingly* small amount of wrong-doing going on. They’re there to demonstrate that we’re doing everything we can to catch the behaviour that isn’t happening. Millions of pounds, every year, to prove we are trying to catch that black swan. And that’s just one bank, one area of regulation.
And banks mostly don’t make big money on “fast and loose” deals. They make tiny amounts of money on enormous quantities of entirely safe deals. If fixed costs like Compliance go up, then either those tiny margins go up and the costs get passed on to the customer, or the banks stop facilitating the business.
Either way, the costs of financial services are going to go through the roof if this continues, because the banks will have to start looking at the things like current accounts and mortgages that are currently heavily subsidised by other areas.