Alternative Remittance Systems / Underground Banking / Hawala
Alternative remittance systems are financial services, traditionally operating outside the regulated financial sector, where value or funds are moved from one geographic location to another. There are several methods by which these systems operate and these are often referred to by different terms, including ‘hawala’, ‘hundi’, ‘fei-chien’ and ‘the black market peso exchange’.
Below are a number of documents regarding issues of operation, vulnerability, regulation and supervision of underground banking and alternative remittance systems.
Further resouces will be added in due course.
Documents
APG Alternative Remittance Regulation Implementation Package_2003 (260.58 KB) A Case Study of Tamil Transnational Money Transfer Networks (Undiyal), Canada/Sri Lanka - Cheran & (1.07 MB) Approaches to a Regulatory Framework for Remittance Systems - IMF (Ingves) 2005 (296.94 KB) Best Practices concerning Hawala - MENAFATF 2005 (197.10 KB) Canada-Somali remittance sector - Nathanson Study (Hamza) 2006 (335.24 KB) Canada-Vietnam Remittance Corridor - World Bank (Hernández-Coss) 2005 (4.07 MB) Following the Terrorist Informal Trail- Hawala Mechanism - CCC (Looney) 2002 (113.17 KB) FATF - ARS typologies - contained in Yearly Typologies Report 2005 (0.98 MB) Hawala ARS & its role in ML - FinCEN and Interpol (Jost & Sandhu) 2000 (184.73 KB) Help Needed for the 'Unbanked' - Washington Post (Motoo Noguchi) 2004 (19.96 KB) ICE Reaching Out to Financial Industry - Cornerstone Rpt (ICE) 2004 (957.84 KB) Regulatory Frameworks for Hawala and Other ARS - IMF 2005 (1.55 MB) THE IMPACT OF GLOBAL INTERNATIONAL INFORMAL BANKING ON CANADA - The Nathanson Centre (Munshani) 2005 (282.99 KB) Industry Alert_Fictitious Instrument Fraud - Cornerstone Rpt (ICE) 2004 (623.26 KB) Informal Remittances from the UK- Values, Flows & Mechanisms - DFID (Blackwell & Seddon) 2004 (1.27 MB) Informal Value Transfer Systems & Criminal Organizations - Nikos Passas (198.61 KB)
Presentations - 3rd International Conference On Hawala.doc (23.50 KB) FATF Report on Trade Based Mony Laundering (964.08 KB) ML & TF Typologies Report - FATF 2005 (0.98 MB) Remittances in the Pacific - An Overview - ADB (Connell & Brown) 2005 (435.48 KB) Underground Banking: Legitimate Remittance Network or Money Laundering System - AIC (McCusker) 2005 (190.16 KB) ADB’s AMLCFT Policy & Alternative Remittance Systems - O'Sullivan Sept 2005 (129.15 KB)