Company: BWFG
Filing Date: 2025-03-05
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001505732-25-000052
Chunk: 35

Company: Bankwell Financial Group, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-03-05
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1
Chunk 35
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21, 2025. However, on February 27, 2025, FINCen announced that it will not be enforcing the March 21st deadline and will instead issue a new “interim final rule” by March 21, 2025 that could change timelines and reporting requirements. On March 2, 2025, the Treasury Department announced that it will not be enforcing the CTA against U.S. citizens or domestic reporting companies and that it would be issuing a proposed rule that will narrow the scope of the CTA filing requirements to foreign reporting companies only. 

16

On September 29, 2022, FinCEN finalized the first of three proposed rules to implement changes to the beneficial ownership requirements and related amendments set forth in the CTA (the “BOI Reporting Rule”).  The BOI Reporting Rule, which became effective on January 1, 2024, prescribes which corporate entities created in or registered to do business in the U.S. will be required to report beneficial ownership information (“BOI”) directly to FinCEN.  On December 21, 2023, FinCEN issued a final rule, effective on February 20, 2024, (the “Access Rule”), which prescribes the circumstances under which BOI reported to the FinCEN registry may be disclosed to various government agencies and to financial institutions using BOI to facilitate compliance with regulatory customer due diligence requirements and how BOI must be protected.  Under the Access Rule, FinCEN may disclose BOI to a financial institution to facilitate compliance with customer due diligence requirements under applicable law, provided the relevant reporting company has consented to such disclosure. The Access Rule requires financial institutions that obtain BOI from FinCEN to develop and implement administrative, technical, and physical safeguards reasonably designed to protect the information, but provides that such institutions will be able to satisfy this requirement by apply to BOI the same security and information handling procedures the use to protect customer’s nonpublic personal information in compliance with the GBLA. On December 21, 2023, federal and state bank regulators issued an Interagency Statement that states that the Access Rule does not create a new regulatory requirement for banks to access BOI from the CTA registry, create a supervisory expectation that they do so or necessitate changes to BSA/AML compliance programs designed to comply with the existing Customer Due Diligence rule (the “current CDD Rule”) and other existing BSA requirements, such as customer identification program requirements