The number of financial agents that these intermediaries use is very large owing to the wide mesh of the requirements to enter the market and the possibility of combining the activity with others of a commercial nature (telephony, internet, food shops, supermarkets, etc.).
At 31 December 2006 the register kept by the UIC contained 38,200 financial agents, of which 50 per cent operated in the money transfer sector. The financial intermediaries and their agents are subject to the anti-money-laundering provisions. They are required to identify customers, record transactions in the single computerized archive (archivio unico informatico AUI) and report suspicious transactions.