Service Case 4: Support for Cross-Domain Interoperability
Supporting the prevention of financial crime and of money laundering, market transparency, and the prudential supervision of financial institutions.
This service case has been identified to deal explicitly with issues of interoperability across domains.
There are a number of domains in which the interaction with actors from the business register domain can be an extremely important value-added capability. The information and data exchanged among registers (as results of the first two services and other services that will be developed as part of the exploitation, like cross border mergers, disqualified directors, etc), together with the indicators that will be available from the dashboard and integrated with the other punctual company information (already provided by the national registers directly or within the EBR Service) are of key value for other administrations and supervisory authorities.
This service case will specifically address four key domains:
Prevention of financial crime. National agencies in charge of investigating and preventing financial crime can clearly benefit from access to information available within business registers, both at the national level and cross-border. A cross-border access to business registers data, integrated with information about business mobility, business mobility monitoring, disqualified directors, cross border mergers, etc. could allow the agencies responsible for tracking financial crime to identify ownership linkages between companies, used for suspect fund movements.
Transparency for regulated markets. An important case for cross-domain interoperability can be found in the information dissemination requirements imposed on companies the securities of which are traded on a regulated securities market in the EU ("issuers"). One of the main objectives of the so-called Transparency Directive 2004/109/EC of 15 December 2004 is to facilitate access for investors to information about issuers incorporated in other Member States. The Transparency Directive states that "information which has been disseminated should be available in a centralised way in the home Member State of the issuer, allowing an European network to be built up, accessible at affordable prices for retail investors, while not leading to unnecessary duplication of filing requirements for issuers" (Art. 25).
Prevention of money laundering. Business registers are a valuable source of information for law enforcement agencies involved in the prevention of money laundering for which, again, information originated from the first two services and other services that will be developed as part of the exploitation, like cross border mergers and disqualified directors, will represent a clear added value.
Prudential supervision of financial institutions. A further case for interoperability across domains concerns the supervisory system put in place by various directives on financial institutions (credit institutions, investment firms, financial conglomerates etc.). Cross-border access to the business registers by the authorities in charge of supervising financial institutions will enable these authorities to check information provided to them by the supervised entities (e.g. information as to the group structure, information on major shareholdings, on board membership by directors of the supervised entities etc.). A rapid access by these authorities to the data in the business register in another Member State, together with information about business mobility, business mobility monitoring, disqualified directors, cross border mergers, etc would clearly constitute a valuable tool for exercising prudential supervision.
This service case will provide the core capabilities of the BRITE platform needed to interact across domains, such as the mechanisms for the secure and trusted exchange of information, as well as mechanisms and approaches for defining semantics of information exchanged between domains, publication of data, publish and subscribe mechanisms, different access rights management (access from public bodies versus private institutions).
This service case will initially be implemented in Spain, Italy and Ireland.
Related documents:
Lead partner: TB-Solutions
Contact: Ms. Mayte Hurtado
