Wire Transfer Travel Rule

We have had cases where foreign beneficiary banks are requesting information from the originating bank for the customer initiating a wire transfer due to the intermediate bank not providing this information. Are we required to provide this information or would this have to be information that is provided to them from the intermediate bank. And if we are as the originating party, what information are we permited to provide. We have banks requesting passport number, id's, dob, etc. Please advise. thanks

Here's FinCEN 2010 - G004, FinCEN's most recent and most detailed guidance on the travel rule. It focuses on what you are required to send; i.e. if you adhered to its requirements as the originating bank you have complied and later breakdowns are not yours to remedy.

If you sent the required information, any intermediary bank is required to forward it so the beneficiary bank should ultimately receive it. (Note the explanation in the Guidance that indicates the intermediary bank is not obligated to send everything you might have sent, only the information required by law.) From my perspective, if you are assured that the information you sent never actually made it to the beneficiary bank you could freely provide it to them in response to a follow up request.

However, if the beneficiary bank wants additional information not addressed by the travel rule, but perhaps by their policies or even the laws in their country, I see no basis for providing that after they have accepted the wire unless there is some international or systemic authority for doing so. If they are refusing acceptance because they want information beyond that required by U.S. law, then I'd let the customer decide what we would and would not give them.

Others here have more first hand experience with international wires than I do so give them a chance to respond...

Vidaxi,

Are the beneficiary banks outside the U.S.? What kind of information are they asking for?

Other countries have their own laws regarding the information required on wire transfers; for example, India requires purpose of the payment, Canada requires a complete beneficiary party address, Turkey requires IBANs for both the originating party and the beneficiary party.

These countries are required to screen their incoming wires for missing information and can reject the wire, and in some cases are required to file a Suspicious Transaction Report with their regulator.

We recently had to request the DOB of an originator from Mexico after a potential OFAC hit. OFAC advised us that unless we had it and could clear the sender, we had to freeze the money. It wasn't easy to get and neither company was happy with the bank.

simple answer...if you want the beneficiary to receive the funds, the answer is yes. If the requested information is not provided, the funds can be held indefinitely. And you have minimal recourse.

i've never heard of an intermediary bank not passing along all the information contained in a wire transfer, you may wish to choose a new correspondent for international wires.

NotDoneYet,
Were you the receiving or sending bank?

We were receiving bank.

thanks for your responses. The Wire transfer travel rule limits the amount of information that we can provide. In the cases that I have mentioned, they are requesting DOB, Passport information, etc. Aren't we inc compliance by providing what the Wire Transfer Rule requires? In addition, why would the beneficiary bank be requesting it from us if the intermediate bank should be the one passing through this information.

It sounds like they are trying to clear your customer from some kind of screening list. This information is not required by the travel rule, and if you didn't send it with the original wire transfer, there's no way your intermediate bank could have passed it along, so if the beneficiary bank wants that information, they would have to come back to you. As others have said, if your customer wants his transaction to go through, s/he may be willing to allow you to share that information with the beneficiary bank.

They'd have been a darn sight less happy with the bank if you had to freeze the funds and let them fight it out with OFAC.

From the Guidance linked above:

An intermediary financial institution may receive supplementary information about a payment beyond the information the travel rule requires to be sent to the next financial institution in the payment chain. For example, a payment order may contain additional information about the payment or the parties to the transaction. Due to differences in format and detail included in different systems, such as Fedwire, CHIPS, SWIFT and proprietary message formats, this additional information may not be readily transferable to the format used to send a subsequent payment order. In that event, the sending intermediary institution would be in compliance with the travel rule as long as all of the information specified in the travel rule was included in the subsequent payment order.

The intermediary bank is not obligated to send everything you might have sent, only the information required by law..

This is incorrect...the travel rule covers what information you MUST provide, but it does not prevent you from sending additional information.

Agree with Happy's statement. We've been getting a lot of requests for additional info such as DOB, POB, ID, etc (primarily from the bigger banks - guessing some of those very large OFAC fines have had some affect LOL) but the requests are all usually related to possible OFAC hits not travel rule.

It would be impossible to disagree with Happy's statement, but he did not imply that the originator had a right to make additional disclosures in response to requests from the beneficiary bank. The travel rule was never intended to address that.

No Ken, just addressing the incorrect statement that the travel rule limits what they can provide. It simply says at a minimum what you must provide.

Now, as an originating bank, if the bene bank came asking for additional information, i would provide nothing else without the originator giving authority to provide it (and we've been in this situation more and more frequently on internaitonal wires). Not opening that can of worms...

As long as you caution your customer that if the information isn't supplied, there could be a problem having the funds delivered.