Remittances to Samoa: A Safe Payment Corridor

This paper provides a targeted analysis of ML/TF risks pertaining to remittances to Samoa, confirming limited risks, and discusses potential opportunities for streamlining applicable AML/CFT requirements to operationalize regional remittances risk assessments. Over the past decade, Samoa has been subject to de-risking, which has resulted in Correspondent Banking Relationship (CBR) withdrawals, CBR fragility and rising concentration risks, especially for money transfer operators (MTOs). The paper presents an analysis of authorities’ and the financial sector’s risk understanding and publicly available information on crime and the ML risk environment and concludes that there are limited ML/TF threats to the main remittance corridors to Samoa. Samoa’s ML/TF vulnerabilities - mostly related to capacity and resource constraints - are alleviated by the low ML/TF threat environment and regional information exchange and capacity building. Based on these findings, the paper provides an overview of potential regulatory and supervisory measures to promote a risk-based approach to CBRs to streamline the AML/CFT requirements for low-risk remittances to Samoa.