The international standards require supervisors to appropriately supervise, monitor and regulate financial institutions for compliance with AML/CFT requirements commensurate with their risks. As such, to effectively implement the above, a country’s AML/CFT supervision has to be embedded in the broader framework of prudential and business conduct supervision. This is to leverage on and optimise the synergies, expertise and resources to ensure effectiveness of both overall supervision of financial institutions and specific AML/CFT supervision. Supervisors are required to ensure effective management of ML/TF risk and compliance with AML/CFT requirements by the financial institutions by assessing institution’s policies, procedures and processes for identifying and managing ML/TF risk and in complying with regulatory requirements. This integration also ensure that supervisors are coherent and apply high standards in fulfilling their responsibilities for both AML/CFT and prudential supervision. As for AML/CFT, supervisors have to include AML/CFT risk in their risk based approach to supervisions and to be fully aware of consequences and implications of theirs supervised institutions’ failures to adequately identify and manage all risks including ML/TF risk. This is because the issue is no longer just about technical compliance but more importantly, whether the supervisory framework has been effective in mitigating and in ensuring adequate enforcement against ML/TF. Therefore, to equip supervisors in fulfilling their duties to conduct AML/CFT supervision, courses such as this is important to provide all of you with an understanding of the importance of reviewing the operational, legal, and reputational risks associated with ML/TF and their impact on the overall bank assessment.

Yet, not only has there been no depreciation pressure on the Hong Kong dollar: it has in fact strengthened following capital inflows into Hong Kong since the outbreak of the crisis in midSeptember last year. Consistent with the principles of the Currency Board, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) has bought a total of $ billion, injecting $ billion into the local money market. The inflow of funds to the Hong Kong dollar was a welcome development, paving the way for monetary easing, which was fortuitously the appropriate monetary policy stance to support the economy. The reasons put forward for the inflow have not been a cause for concern for they did not seem to relate to exchange-rate speculation. Market consensus about the  BIS Review 19/2009  1  causes pointed to the unwinding of carry trades and the repatriation of funds by corporates to finance operations in Hong Kong. It is also likely that there have been some inflows to position for investment in Hong Kong, in light of the better economic prospects of the region, and in particular, China. The second factor in the resilience of Hong Kong’s financial markets is our robust banking system. One of the lessons from this experience is that the stability and effectiveness of the banking system becomes even more essential when financial crisis shuts down the two other financial intermediation channels: the bond market and the stock market.