Transaction as little as 1000 RMB?

www.forbes.com/[...]

with crooks having armies of go-fers, makse more sense than the 300k

I wonder how this will affect all those landlords who want rent paid in cash on an annual basis?

@AllPage: I don't think it does, at least not to any significant degree.

I don't think there is the manpower to

look at every 1k transaction. But it would give a wider legal scope to examine any ' person of interest' .

Might relate to something I experienced couple of weeks ago.

As part of registering a business here, we had to choose a bank for that. Our consultant initially suggested Bank of China, since they have done lot of similar cases with them in past and it was supposed to be easier than any other bank.

But then on sudden notice it turned upside own, as BOC Kunming branch had just been visited by authorities and they are now required (or choose to) apply so much scrutiny to things like business account openings, that our consultant advised to choose any other bank than BOC.

If I remember correctly, the new policy from BOC would have required me to legalize more documents from my home country just to open the bank account.

And that would basically force me to fly home and back just to get the papers - something that I will need to do anyway for related work permit, but that I'm not planning to do until next winter.

@tiger,
Manpower would not be the requirement for looking at every small transaction. I did some of this work back home when I worked in the audit automation department of a bank.

What they might look for (using computer programs of course) is a high volume of 1k transactions leading to a single account, probably originating at an ATM or transfers from other people.
The drug lords could work that way with many, many people doing the small transactions.
They'll find another way around it like they always do.

The most popular method in Canada to launder money effectively was to have a "legitimate" business that would naturally have a high cash volume, like a fruit market or supermarket.

If you go outside the expat circle, you might find bank accounts and bank cards even credit card for hire. I could if I want to, could rent an account. That is happening wide spread in the Pearl River delta. :-)

At western banks, we monitor each and every transaction no matter how small as well as the overall sum of transactions to prevent smurfing in & out or even just the volume in general to look for possible suspicious transaction patterns such as clan activities. If China ever wants to internationalize its financial markets, its mandatory for the country to improve its anti-money laundering standards.

The problem will be that the banks in China aren't really able to do a proper monitoring due to technical issues, as the huge number of clients forces them to run their banking systems in a multi entity multi instance mode scattered all over the country. Due to that additional layer of complexity and the pace of regulatory changes, they often struggle with synchronization and reconciliation. This is also why you sometimes have to go to the branch or at least the province where you opened your account to handle certain things...

good observations, kurtosis.

yeah, in china, a "good contact" with THE PARTY CONNECTION is very useful. so, if a person can not get a loan from a local bank, the person can got to the locale with a right contact and get a loan approved, for example, that goes for moving fund...etc. i would say, not having timely cross checks is very important for the people with power to exercise. why changes? for whom? hahahah