Ladies and gentlemen, Let's now shift gears from the institutional to the systemic. With the continuously evolving ML/TF landscape, banks are expected to play a more active role in protecting the wider integrity of the financial system – and ultimately the public funds they are entrusted with. This demands greater vigilance and awareness of trends of serious crimes in the country and emerging threats impacting the system. It also calls for effective responses in the form of more robust, agile controls to address these identified trends and threat in a timely manner. From the National Risk Assessment 2020 undertaken by members of the National Coordination Committee to counter money laundering and to assess and facilitate the understanding of ML/TF risk exposures, it was found that the top five high-risks crimes that pose substantial ML/TF threats to the country are corruption, fraud, smuggling, illicit drug trafficking and organised crimes. Corruption remains a systemic issue, and is particularly insidious, since it facilitates and sometimes enables others significant crimes such as fraud, drugs, human trafficking and environmental crimes. The assessment also indicated that the banking sector is exposed to high level of ML /TF risks. With banks as the nexus between all financial and non-financial sectors, the banking platform has become an ideal channel to be abused for criminal activities including corruption.
This cooperation has also included active participation in public-private partnership initiatives, including the National Scams Response Centre. As a member of the Financial Action Taskforce or FATF, Malaysia will once again be undergoing a Mutual Evaluations Exercise in 2024 and 2025. For the uninitiated, this is an in-depth assessment of the country's measures to combat ML/TF risks and its compliance with the international standards set by the FATF. This will be the fourth time for us and the last one was done in 2014. It is my hope that the stride made in Malaysia's AML/CFT ecosystem, strong commitment of all institutions towards a highintegrity financial system, and effective cooperation between the industry and public authorities will be reflected in the eventual outcomes of the Evaluation Exercise. In particular, it is paramount for all staff of reporting institutions to maintain high professional standards, adhere to existing confidentiality requirements, and undergo adequate AML/CFT trainings. Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to leave you with a line that is often quoted when speaking about integrity: "Integrity is doing the right thing even when no one is watching". While the quote may have been over-used, it has not dimmed its truth one bit. It is much easier to do the right thing under other watchful eyes, the safety barriers of procedures, or even the instruction of prescriptive rules. But oftentimes, the decisions that will matter most are what we choose to do when nobody, but our conscience is watching.