September 2023

In a recent article1 in Regulation Asia, Clare Rowley of GLEIF (the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation), sets out how comprehensive identification of legal entities and their behaviours is the key to fighting modern and future financial crime.

In fact, GLIEF’s very purpose is to provide “open, standardized and high-quality legal entity reference data. By doing so, GLEIF enables people and businesses to make smarter, less costly and more reliable decisions about who to do business with”.

Individual rights are important. None more so than in how to spend our own money.

But simple freedoms are not always as simple as they look. Take gambling. There are few genuinely successful gamblers. And the unsuccessful majority includes a significant number who are addicted to the deceptive hope of that one big win.

Gambling addiction comes with personal financial stress and, crucially, real collateral damage to the families of addicts. Personal and social harm is destructive and extensive.

Financial services such as money remittance face a simple challenge: how to get money from A to B safely, securely and especially, without abuse of the system by criminals.

A sensitive example is Hawala – an informal money transfer system that originated in India and is now also used widely in the Horn of Africa, and across the Middle East and North Africa. Dominant features are its emphasis on personal trust, and that it operates at low cost outside the “conventional” banking system.