The Federal Service for Financial Monitoring (Rosfinmonitoring) has requested the right to receive photos and videos from banks. The agency hopes to use these materials to combat money withdrawal and terrorist financing (AML/CFT), RBC reports.
The agency is primarily interested in materials from cameras installed in bank branches and at ATMs or terminals. Such cameras record the process of customer service, and recordings from them “help to identify the real holder of a bank card, as well as the location of wanted persons, which helps solve crimes. The scope and nature of the information requested will be determined by the government.
A representative of Rosfinmonitoring clarified to the publication that “the requirement will only apply to materials available to financial organizations” made after the amendments entered into force. Companies will not have to organize additional photography and video recording.
“Transferring photos and videos to Rosfinmonitoring will be useful in detecting dubious fraudulent transactions, when one person can use several documents or their copies to issue banking products. Or the operation is carried out without the client presenting an identification document,” believes Lyudmila Sokolova, head of the financial monitoring department of Zenit Bank.
The disadvantage of the proposed method is that its implementation will most likely fall entirely on the shoulders of banks.
“I doubt that Rosfinmonitoring will be ready to accept such information from banks in any format. Surely there will be some standards, which means that the colossal costs of their implementation will fall on market participants,” says Alexey Voylukov, vice-president of the Association of Russian Banks (ADB). He clarified that today there is no uniform regulation in what format to record photos and videos and how many days to store them. Each bank decides this independently, based on its approach to risks, and a credit institution does not always have prompt access to such materials.
“For example, recordings from ATM cameras can be stored on the device itself, erased and overwritten over time. In order to provide them, such materials then need to be unloaded and stored somewhere.”
According to him, credit institutions also do not understand how much such information Rosfinmonitoring will request and how often.
The analysis of photos and videos from cameras could be facilitated by a fully functioning Unified Biometric System (UBS) filled with samples, if there were casts of almost all at least able-bodied residents of Russia, but this is impossible in manual mode, Voylukov emphasizes. Currently, banks have approximately 70 million facial impressions, but only 4–5 million of them meet EBS standards.
The agency is primarily interested in materials from cameras installed in bank branches and at ATMs or terminals. Such cameras record the process of customer service, and recordings from them “help to identify the real holder of a bank card, as well as the location of wanted persons, which helps solve crimes. The scope and nature of the information requested will be determined by the government.
A representative of Rosfinmonitoring clarified to the publication that “the requirement will only apply to materials available to financial organizations” made after the amendments entered into force. Companies will not have to organize additional photography and video recording.
“Transferring photos and videos to Rosfinmonitoring will be useful in detecting dubious fraudulent transactions, when one person can use several documents or their copies to issue banking products. Or the operation is carried out without the client presenting an identification document,” believes Lyudmila Sokolova, head of the financial monitoring department of Zenit Bank.
The disadvantage of the proposed method is that its implementation will most likely fall entirely on the shoulders of banks.
“I doubt that Rosfinmonitoring will be ready to accept such information from banks in any format. Surely there will be some standards, which means that the colossal costs of their implementation will fall on market participants,” says Alexey Voylukov, vice-president of the Association of Russian Banks (ADB). He clarified that today there is no uniform regulation in what format to record photos and videos and how many days to store them. Each bank decides this independently, based on its approach to risks, and a credit institution does not always have prompt access to such materials.
“For example, recordings from ATM cameras can be stored on the device itself, erased and overwritten over time. In order to provide them, such materials then need to be unloaded and stored somewhere.”
According to him, credit institutions also do not understand how much such information Rosfinmonitoring will request and how often.
The analysis of photos and videos from cameras could be facilitated by a fully functioning Unified Biometric System (UBS) filled with samples, if there were casts of almost all at least able-bodied residents of Russia, but this is impossible in manual mode, Voylukov emphasizes. Currently, banks have approximately 70 million facial impressions, but only 4–5 million of them meet EBS standards.
