In this paper we set out our final requirements and guidance on recovering the costs of OPBAS through fees.
OPBAS is a new regulator set up by the government within the FCA in January 2018 to strengthen the UK’s anti-money laundering (AML) supervisory regime and ensure that professional body AML supervisors provide consistently high standards of supervision.
This paper sets how we will recover the costs of running OPBAS from the bodies it supervises. We also provide feedback on the responses we received to our consultation paper on our proposals (CP17/35)[2].
Who this applies to
This paper applies to the professional body supervisors listed in Schedule 1 of the Money Laundering Regulations and bodies considering applying to be listed. It will also be of interest to designated professional bodies.
It will also be of interest, for information only, to firms registered under the Money Laundering Regulations and not authorised by the FCA for any other activities, since we have taken the opportunity to set out in the FEES Manual the charges payable by them and which have up to now been difficult to find.
Next steps
We are writing to all professional body supervisors asking them to submit data to us for fees purposes by 2 July 2018, using the definition in Appendix 1 of this paper. We will use the data to calculate a fee-rate for 2018/19. This will be set to recover both the annual running costs for 2018/19 and the set-up costs spread over 2 years.
We will consult on the fee-rate in the autumn and intend to intend to finalise the rate in December 2018 so that we can issue invoices from January 2019. From April 2019 we intend to integrate the OPBAS fee into the standard fees consultation cycle, with the 2019/20 fee-rate forming part of our April 2019 CP on FCA fee-rates.