South Africa has 18 months to impact the country’s greylisting. This as the International Financial Action Task Force (FATF) plans to review SA’s greylisting in January 2025. And it has everything to do with Anti-Money-Laundering efforts.
Money Laundering in SA
Every year, $2–$8 Billion is laundered through the South African finance system alone. Yet it's estimated less than 30% of required companies are compliant, which is a considerable risk. Not to mention that under the Prevention of Organized Crime Act alone, the penalty for non-compliance is R100M or 30 years imprisonment. See how it affects the entire region in our post on illicit financial flows in Southern Africa.
Also see how greylisting impacts the JSE in South Africa, learn about AML compliance for microlenders, the process for AML in microfinance and see SA’s FIC urgent plea to lawyers and estate agents: get compliant to avoid AML penalties. And discover why you need great AML in property sales.
See why we need microfinance AML, as well as how to get Microfinance AML complaint and all about micro-credit AML.
The Cost of Non-Cmpliance
In the past, though, we haven’t really seen these penalties enforced at the scale we see elsewhere (The US, Europe and Asia collectively paid over $10,1bn in AML fines in 2022 alone.) But that is set to change as the SA government now needs to get the country off the grey list, meaning they’ll look at anti-money-laundering compliance much more closely.
Also get an inside look at balancing cost vs AML compliance in Africa and see how to get sanction screening in Africa.
And see why the SA Reserve Bank has fined Grindrod Bank R10m for non-compliance.
Are you AML compliant?
