October 16, 2019, | AtoZ Markets - The Economic Crime Plan 2019-22 declared that the FCA would be the anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing supervisor for crypto-asset businesses, which is going to be effective from January 10, 2020. In the Consultation Paper published, the FCA fixes out its proposals for recovering the costs of this new role. The FCA is funded completely by fees and derived from the firms it regulates.
FCA Crypto Asset Business Registrations
All UK crypto-asset businesses carrying on activities will need to register with the FCA from January 10, 2020. This involves all businesses already FCA registered or authorized for additional activities. The FCA will supervise and can take any necessary action against a crypto asset business.
An existing business, which has been carrying on crypto asset activities before January 10, 2020, must be registered by January 10, 2021, or stop that activity. An existing business that has got a decision from the FCA to refuse registration before January 10, 2021, must also stop their crypto-asset activity.
The FCA will recover its costs from crypto-asset businesses in different ways. Some of them are one-off registration fee, a periodic or annual fee. As crypto asset activities will be new activities following the MLRs, the FCA has limited information on the different business standards and the relative complexity involved in assessing them. The regulator, accordingly, proposes to distribute recovery of the costs of setting up and operating the registration process. The FCA estimates the whole cost of this process at around 400,000 euros, and it is aware of about 80 applicants. The FCA consequently proposes to set the registration fee at 5,000 euros.
Read More: How to Manage Your Cryptos at Bearish Market Times?
Key Features of FCA proposal
There are some key features of the FCA’s proposals on periodic fees for crypto-asset businesses.
- Fee block: the regulator is suggesting to make a new fee-block for crypto-asset companies.
- Tariff base: Following initial studies with a range of crypto-asset businesses, the FCA believes its standard definition of income would apply. And this can be the most appropriate method of distributing cost recovery.
- Reporting date: The FCA asks the payers to report the basis of their accounts, for their financial cycle ending as the previous year.
- Thresholds and minimum fees: The FCA establishes minimum fees in various fee-blocks. Up to a particular amount of income, fee-payers pay a fixed least fee plus a variable fee on any income.
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