The Criminal Justice (Money Laundering & Terrorist Financing) Bill 2009

The Main Purpose of the Bill is to:

•Identify and verify the identity of their customer and of any assets ultimate beneficial owner, and to monitor their business relationship with the customer; •Report suspicions of money laundering or terrorist financing to the public authorities, usually, the national financial intelligence unit; •Take supporting measures, such as ensuring proper training of the personnel and the establishment of appropriate internal preventive policies and procedures.

The 2009/Bill/Act will be applicable to Intermediaries – investment, mortgage and insurance and other investment/insurance businesses which are regulated by the Financial Regulator.  Going forward the term “Designated Body” will be replaced by the term “Designated persons”

The changes which the new Act will bring are:

•“Designated Persons” will be required to perform customer due diligence on a risk based approach. There will be 3 types of customer due diligence depending on the circumstances, (1) Simplified (2) Standard (3) Enhanced identification

•The following products are exempted from the requirements in relation to Customer Due Diligence: – Life Assurance policies with an Annual premium of not more than € 1000 …

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Financial Fragility and Corporate Governance in Ireland today

This is footage of a talk given by Prof. Stephen Kinsella of the Kemmy Business School in University of Limerick, about his thoughts on regulation, corporate governance, and the Minsky Hypothesis.

You can watch the whole playlist here. Or go to the Irish CFA channel on youtube and check out the follow on videos, there are six in total, the questions and answer section is particularly interesting to anybody who may have an interest in financial regulation and some of the pitfalls of it, Stephens thoughts are quite refreshing to the normal solutions you’ll hear (although I don’t agree with them all!).

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Beware of Expert Opinion from Promoters.

Lately we have been witnessing a resurfacing of property promoters in the press after a long period of silence. We want to reassert our advice that people should do their own homework before embarking on a large asset purchase be it property or otherwise.

How can you tell if it makes sense to buy a property? Our suggestion, as a financial firm, is that you talk to a financial adviser, you determine your own circumstances, you look at your own unique situation, and that you don’t base your opinion on what you hear on the radio or TV from people in the property business. The people who are restarting to champion property now are doing so under the banner that ‘it is cheap to buy’, part of the ‘cheap’ is due to exceptionally low interest rates, which invariably will go up some day.

That is not to say ‘don’t buy property‘, far from it, what we are trying to tell people is ‘make prudent decisions’, don’t buy any asset you can’t afford …

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Will Specialist or Sub-Prime lenders be better off?

With the news coming out daily about prime lenders facing higher and higher impairment charges it begs the question of who will do better during a downturn, specialist/sub prime lenders or prime high street banks?

Banks stated that they feel impairments of up to 90 basis points were likely, some have revised this figure higher several times with NIB predicting impairment of upwards of 300 basis points. Sub-prime lenders on the other hand start off with predictions of high impairment and they price and gauge the risk accordingly from the outset. Given that starting point, could it be a case that Irish specialist lenders may come out the other side of the liquidity crisis with an overall book that fares proportionately on margins than other prime lenders?

To answer this question we must first consider margins, with many banks typical margin is from 1% to 1.5% on average, however, with many prime lenders this margin is  lower because of low margin trackers that were a point of heavy competition between …

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