The Financial Advice Association Australia (FAAA) is launching a new service to help advisers meet their obligations under the customer due diligence (CDD) requirements of the new anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorism financing (CTF) reforms due to have effect from March 2026.
“We have heard and completely understand the frustrations and costs members face with CDD. So, the board asked us to develop SafeID. FAAA SafeID offers significant benefits for members and has been developed to be an end-to-end client identification and verification platform,” FAAA policy senior manager Heather McEvoy told attendees of a practitioner webinar held today.
“It is our secure, faster, professional, digital client ID solution and has the ability not just to conduct immediate ID verification and PEP (politically exposed person) and sanctions checks, but also to provide a report that product providers can use to rely on the result of these checks.”
FAAA SafeID is powered by KordaMentha and will operate under a per user model with a discount for the industry body’s members. Additional details around costs will be released soon.
Under the AML/CTL reforms, electronic verification of clients will be permitted and financial advisers will also no longer be required to keep certified copies of client identification documents.
“A critical change for you, that I’m sure you’ll all be very delighted about and that will alleviate a lot of your frustrations with this, is you are not required to keep copies of identification documents, so no more certified copies,” McEvoy revealed.
She pointed out financial advisers instead will only need to record the details of the relevant identification documents, such as the licence number and the type of document for a driver’s licence.
Noting product providers have often asked advisers to furnish the identification documents, she reiterated the new FAAA SafeID report will be something that can be provided to these industry stakeholders in order for them to meet their requirements to gather this information.
