2026-01-23
This year, Lietuvos bankas plans to conduct a total of around 20 inspections and visits. The focus will be on the compliance of financial market participants with anti-money laundering and counter terrorist financing requirements.
“As the market’s maturity is growing, financial institutions have improved their risk management and internal control systems, so we will focus on documentary supervision, thematic analyses and counselling, especially as regards the implementation of new requirements. When planning supervisory activities, we seek to avoid excessive administrative burden while ensuring that the measures applied are adequate to manage the detected shortcomings or risks,” says Renata Bagdonienė, Director of the Prudential Supervision Department at Lietuvos bankas.
This year, 2 banks, 1 central credit union, 1 electronic money institution, 1 payment institution, and 1 crowdfunding service provider have been selected for routine inspections.
In addition to the mentioned 6 routine inspections, Lietuvos bankas also plans to conduct 15 non-routine inspections or visits. The inspections will involve assessing the compliance of up to 10 different financial market participants with anti-money laundering and counter terrorist financing requirements, as well as the compliance of up to 2 issuers with international financial reporting standards and the provision of payment services by 1 financial market participant. It is also planned to conduct post-selection inspections of up to 2 electronic money or payment institutions.
At least 1 inspection will be carried out to check how a financial market participant ensures fraud prevention.
All undertakings are selected for inspection based on the risk-based approach to supervision and expert assessment. Inspections of banks directly supervised by the European Central Bank (ECB) might be also carried out in cooperation with ECB experts.
Lietuvos bankas has published its plans for routine inspections since 2017.
Lietuvos bankas has also developed and published standardised templates to be used during anti-money laundering and counter terrorist financing inspections. They are designed to collect information about the processes, clients and operations of financial market participants.
These templates will help financial market participants to better prepare for inspections by clarifying expectations, allowing for information to be presented in a structured and uniform manner and contributing to the reduction of the administrative burden.
The templates are published on the website of Lietuvos bankas under the heading “Preparation for the anti-money laundering and counter terrorist financing inspection process” together with practical examples of filling out of the templates and additional advice.