Handbook of Anti-Money Laundering.

CHAPTER 8THE WOLFSBERG PRINCIPLES²

² Excerpts from the Wolfsberg Principles reproduced with kind permission of the Wolfsberg Group. All rights reserved.

The Wolfsberg Group is an association of eleven global banks which aims to develop financial service industry standards and related products for Know Your Customer, Anti-Money-Laundering and Counter-Terrorist-Financing policies.

The Group came together in 2000, at Château Wolfsberg in north-eastern Switzerland, in the company of representatives from Transparency International, including Stanley Morris, and Professor Mark Pieth of the University of Basel, to work on drafting anti-money-laundering guidelines for private banking. The Wolfsberg Anti-Money-Laundering Principles for Private Banking were subsequently published in October 2000, revised in May 2002 and again most recently in June 2012.

The Group then published a Statement on the Financing of Terrorism in January 2002, and also released the Wolfsberg Anti-Money-Laundering Principles for Correspondent Banking in November 2002 with the Wolfsberg Statement on Monitoring Screening and Searching being issued in September 2003. In 2004, the Wolfsberg Group focused on the development of a due diligence model for financial institutions, in cooperation with Banker's Almanac, thereby fulfilling one of the recommendations made in the Correspondent Banking Principles.

During 2005 and early 2006, the Wolfsberg Group of banks actively worked on four separate papers, all of which aimed ...