UK's Cross-Border Information Sharing Guide

The UK recently released a concise guide to cross-border communication within corporations. If you intend to establish a company in the UK please note that the guide contains guidelines that may be helpful to corporations when considering transferring information between registered subsidiaries in the UK and beyond.

The guide is part of an overall plan to combat economic crime through 2021 and is primarily intended to publicly acknowledge and support the general principle of corporate information sharing as an important means of combating financial crime.

Businessmen planning to start a company in the UK should familiarize themselves with the main provisions of the guide because it contains a whole list of benefits that companies receive from a unified procedure for deceiving information. Here are just a few of them:

1. The exchange of information within a corporate entity allows the enterprise to take into account more complete information about beneficial owners, customers and transactions;
2. The task of finding the optimal balance of partnerships within the company is simplified for a corporate entity;
3. Improves the efficiency of customer due diligence procedures and the quality of suspicious activity (SAR) documents that are submitted to the financial security department.

The guide addresses the issue that corporate groups can exchange information between subsidiaries. This necessarily implies the possibility of disclosing this information to a foreign law enforcement agency.

UK corporations are expected to ensure that their overseas operations comply with UK anti-money laundering and crime financing (AML / CTF) regulations. 

The guide especially emphasizes that procedures aimed at improving the security of transactions, customers, and ultimately states, are very important in the modern world.

Noone can escape GDPR

The document also focuses on GDPR compliance, which implies that data transfers from the UK must be GDPR compliant.

Recall that two years ago, Europe switched to the updated rules for the processing of personal data established by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This regulation has direct effect in all EU countries. An important nuance of the GDPR is the extraterritorial principle of operation of the new European rules of personal data processing, so companies registered in the United Kingdom should be careful about them in any area, but especially if the services are focused on the European or international market.

The document does not provide any guidance as to the form or types of data exchange processes that may be undertaken by corporations, but there is a reference to the FATF Guidelines for more details. If you are planning to develop a business in the UK, we recommend that you read the Guidelines attentively.