With an emphasis on inclusive financial integrity, Cenfri provides technical assistance, tools and skills building to policymakers, regulators, supervisors and compliance heads looking to apply risk-based and outcomes accountable approaches to money laundering, terrorism financing and proliferation-financing risk strategies. Combining our understanding of relevant risks, familiarity with the FATF guidelines, knowledge of identity and identity-proofing capabilities and leveraging our competency in risk data analytics, we support financial service value chains undertake assessments from national level to the financial product level, thereby enabling the adoption of appropriate customer due diligence practices. Cenfri is committed to assisting countries to move off the grey list responsibly, shaping national risk assessment processes with empirical data and working with remittance services’ compliance managers to ensure that low-income households are not disproportionately affected in receiving low-value remittances. We are interested in mitigating the longer-term impact of illicit financial flows using digital technology (regtech, suptech and AI) to evaluate and monitor illicit flows and enhance inclusive financial integrity. We have worked with BankServ Africa, FSD Africa, GIZ, IFAD’s Financing Facility for Remittances, UNCDF and AFI on a range of financial integrity and identity projects. |
Recent years have seen large scale de-risking and financial exclusion happening in developing countries, particularly those countries that most need capital flows to finance social services, aid and development. Where regional economic hubs are de-risked, it has a profound effect on the developmental outcomes for the hub itself as well
How digitising customer due diligence can strengthen providers during COVID-19 and beyond For the last two decades, financial inclusion practitioners have been addressing the barriers that prevent adults from accessing and using financial services that can improve their livelihoods. One of the major barriers, originally uncovered by FinMark Trust in
Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI) in conjunction with Cenfri and supported by FSD Africa are pleased to officially launch the Inclusive Financial Integrity Toolkit. Countries in the sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) region have been on a development curve in setting up effective Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Combating the Financing of Terrorism
Modern financial crime has evolved significantly over the last few decades. Detecting these global networks of sophisticated crime has become more complicated than solving a thousand-piece puzzle in minutes and with half the pieces missing; humanly impossible. This is the kind of complexity that faces the authorities and institutions at
Illicit financial flows (IFFs) represent some of the worst crimes and are a major contributor to corruption and development challenges across the developing world – particularly in Africa, where IFFs coincide with an absence of substantive economic inclusion. They have been estimated to be as large as USD80 billion annually
According to the World Bank Group’s Identification for Development, 1.1 billion people globally, including women, children and refugees, lack any form of officially recognised identification. This is a significant obstacle to financial inclusion and other development efforts, and the global community is increasingly focused on addressing the problem. For instance, the
Despite the growing redundancy of the proof of address requirement, it continues to present an obstacle to the unbanked and underbanked populations who want to access formal financial services. Proof of address has been used by financial institutions to verify the identity of clients despite it offering little value as
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the vulnerability of people, and the financial and other systems that underpin much of our daily existence. Remittance recipients in Africa are likely to be particularly hard hit by both the immediate and longer-term effects of the pandemic. In 2018 alone, personal remittance flows to
BankservAfrica and Cenfri investigate the role of ID proxy initiatives in transforming payment ecosystems in Africa and beyond. Real-time instant payments have become a hallmark of the digital economy and financial system. As part of our growing work in payment ecosystems, this report clarifies and investigates proxy and addressing
