Letters of Credit, OFAC, Antiboycott and AML Regulations for Trade Service Bankers

This training program will provide participants with an essential, basic understanding of U.S. rules and regulations governing international trade. The regulations contain required (and prohibited) business conduct, with penalties for failure to comply including fines, loss of export privileges, and even jail terms. In many cases, banks are required to police transactions they handle and report violations.

Why Should You Attend:

The primary focus of this webinar is to look at regulations with their applicability to trade services: US sanctions enforced by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), Antiboycott regulations maintained by the US Department of Commerce, and anti-money laundering regulations found in section 326 of the USA PATRIOT Act/Bank Secrecy Act (“Know Your Customer”).

In order to understand their purpose, participants will learn about the origins and rationale for these regulations in addition to the requirements and penalties for noncompliance. Participants will be provided with cheat sheets to use in their daily tasks to identify and distinguish between transactions that are prohibited, transactions with know-your-customer requirements, transactions where assets must be frozen, and transactions that merely must be reported.

Learning Objectives:

• Recognize the circumstances under which payment of a letter of credit or documentary collection must be blocked
• Understand whether blocking a payment exposes the bank to lawsuits for nonpayment of letters of credit it issued or confirmed
• Review the red flags of a suspicious transaction that may make it reportable as potential money laundering
• Be able to identify who the customer is in a trade transaction: When is it the importer, the exporter, or the foreign bank?
• Learn what makes a transaction “reportable” or “prohibited” under the antiboycott regulations
• Understand what banks are required to do in order to verify compliance with export licensing requirements (ITAR and EAR)

Areas Covered in the Webinar:

• The intent of sanctions against enemy countries (e.g., the Office of Foreign Assets Control and U.N. sanctions)
• Procedures followed by banks to filter letter of credit and collection transactions for Specially Designated Nationals
• The intent of the antiboycott regulations
• What banks are expected to do when confronted with an antiboycott violation
• The intent of anti-money laundering regulations (e.g., the USA PATRIOT Act/Bank Secrecy Act)
• Identifying who the customer is in a trade transaction
• How banks are supposed to handle suspicious letters of credit

Who Will Benefit:

• Bank operations staff, including supervisors and managers, involved in handling letters of credit, documentary collections, and other trade transactions
• Bank sales representatives and relationship managers who work with exporters and importers
• Bank regulatory compliance staff
• Bank risk managers
• Attorneys
• Accountants
• Exporters and importers