Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good morning, everyone.
First off, I just want to highlight a special thanks to the Canadian government. There's a reason that our office and the secretariat of the Egmont Group of Financial Intelligence Units are in Toronto. It's because the Canadian government gave $5 million back in 2006 so we could open up a secretariat in Toronto in 2007. The commitment from the Canadian government has been continuous throughout. FINTRAC has chaired one of our training working groups and also has been a vice-chair on the Egmont committee.
I'll give you a brief history about the Egmont Group. It started in 1995 with about 20 heads of FIUs sitting around the table saying, how can we share information when it comes to anti-money laundering? That was in 1995, before 9/11 when we started passing out all the TF legislation. We've grown to 147 member jurisdictions now, and we continue to grow. We are having our plenary meeting this summer, in June. We anticipate having over 140 members by then.
The major objectives of the Egmont Group are to improve the effective exchange of information upon request and spontaneously among financial intelligence units, and also to promote the development of effective FIUs globally.
One of the things that we're very proud of is the Egmont Secure Web. It's a secure network whereby FIUs—all of our 147 members—can securely share financial intelligence with each other through the network.
In terms of the importance of information exchange and international cooperation in combatting terrorism financing, there are a few things we think are highly important from the Egmont Group's perspective. It's the importance of the jurisdictions to at least meet the international standards. I believe Canada will be going through its mutual evaluation towards the end of this year. I think the IMF will be leading that evaluation.
Also, we think that the timely exchange of information in terms of terrorism financing is critical and we're going to start having discussions within the Egmont Group on how we can get closer to real time. Is real-time exchange on terrorism financing information possible? What are the resource implications? What are the capacity concerns? And how do we make it happen?
We also think that jurisdictions need to have an effective regime, and this is something that the FATF has evolved through with the changes in the methodology from 2012. The days of just being technically compliant are over. Hopefully, for example, they have what's called “immediate outcome 6” within the FATF recommendations. It talks about how financial intelligence moves through the entire regime, starting from the reporting entities—and Mr. Rudner mentioned that in terms of the banking reporting—all the way to successful prosecutions. It is no longer okay to have just one particular entity doing a good job. It has to work well throughout the whole regime. That's something we need to work on. It's very critical when it comes to terrorism financing.
What is the Egmont Group doing now in terms of terrorism financing? Actually right now there is a meeting in Washington, D.C., of some FIUs that are on a project that's dealing with ISIL and foreign terrorist fighters returning and how they're being financed in this and that. Actually, FINTRAC is playing a very active role in that particular project. I can't go into the specifics at this stage, but we anticipate the work of this project team is going to look at some of the operational information. They're sharing operational information but they're also recording the barriers, either legal or operational, that might come up and that we need to improve or look into. We anticipate that report might feed into the FATF this summer, then also feed into the G-20 report later on.
Challenges facing FIUs in combatting terrorism financing. Domestically, agencies dealing with TF have a bad habit of working in silos. That's something that has to change. Internationally, we need to improve and install mechanisms that share information almost instantaneously. That's a big challenge for FIUs. That's a big challenge for a lot of places.