ECUADOR

On March 11, the Superintendency of Banks (SB), through Resolution SB-2022-0386, amended the Control Standards for money laundering risk management. The document reforms aspects related to corporate governance, due diligence and customer knowledge, beneficial owners and external audit. The resolution is already in force. In addition, the Central Bank of Ecuador (BCE in Spanish) presented its new interactive interest rate tool, through which the latest information can be obtained to facilitate informed decision-making by actors in the financial system and the general public.

Reform of the control regulations for money laundering risk management

The resolution states that controlled entities must design and adopt a physical or electronic application form for the initiation of a business relationship, which must contain at least the information and documentation detailed in Annex 1. If the activity of a potential customer involves international transactions or products in international currencies, the form must contain spaces to collect at least information relating to:

• Type of international transactions they normally carry out, specifying at least: country, currency, justification, beneficiary(ies) and amount.
• Financial products that they would like to contract with the entity in international currencies.

In turn, for the effective management of controlled entities, information on money laundering risk events must be recorded, ordered, classified and available to enable them to define the risk appetite, tolerance, key indicators, limits and treatment of exceptions. Likewise, they will have to permanently feed and update their risk matrix, in order to serve as sufficient support for the methodologies and models to be developed.

Interactive interest rate tool

This new tool includes weekly and monthly data on the amounts of lending and deposit operations, the number of operations, and the effective, nominal and reference rates by credit segment, among others. The information can be disaggregated at the level of the financial institution, whether in the public, private, popular or solidarity sector. In addition, the monthly information can be broken down by provincial economic activity, which allows the supply and demand for credit in the country to be identified.