The National Bank of Ukraine appealed to banks and non-banking financial institutions to warn about the risky financial transactions, like accepting payments for computer games, lotteries, online games and online services.
The NBU refers to the Law of Ukraine “On prevention and counteraction to legalization (laundering) of the proceeds from crime or terrorism financing, as well as financing proliferation of weapons of mass destruction” and warns about the cooperation with unofficial suppliers of these services, whose accounts accumulated tens of millions of hryvnias.
These funds were eventually distributed to the accounts of the individuals and legal entities, as well as were spent for the purchase of “title signs” of Webmoney. Thus, the money “spread” in the chains of financial transactions, according to the NBU, and have signs of fictitiousness. In this case, banks did not perform any analysis of the financial operations of service providers and their compliance with this activity.
The Council of Europe’s Committee of Experts on the Evaluation of Anti-Money Laundering Measures and the Financing of Terrorism claims that the high cash turnover and fictitious entrepreneurship are the main threats for the financial system and economic security of Ukraine. NBU brings attention to the need of identifying and verifying the service providers, a thorough study of the client and analyze of its financial status and activities. In addition, cooperation with unverified customers violates the copyright of the developers of online games and services.
According to the experts, such a request of the National Bank is a planned initiative of the regulator aimed to structure the transactional business in Ukraine, its maximum formalization and bringing it in line with EU norms. For example, the growth of Ukraine’s position in the international rating of Doing Business is directly related to the strict monetary policy of the NBU, thanks to which it was possible to stabilize the exchange rate of the national currency and to facilitate the procedure for mutual settlements with foreign counterparties.
If there is any doubt about the authenticity of the information provided by the service provider, the National Bank recommends conducting an in-depth check in accordance with Ukrainian legislation.
The only payment system in Ukraine, which deals with online games, is the domestic payment system “LEO”, registered FC Leogaming Pay in January 2017. Currently, there are 13 participants in the domestic payment system “LEO”, with the largest non-banking financial institutions of the country, operators of payment structure services, and also the Ukrainian bank SkyBank among them. Leogaming Pay is cooperating with the:
1. “Ukrgasbank”, a state-owned bank, founded in 1993, which has a technical capability to issue electronic money.
2. “Concord Bank” is a Ukrainian commercial bank with a 12-year history and extensive opportunities of acquiring.
FC Leogaming Pay (LeoGaming) is an international processing company headquartered in Kyiv, responsible for accepting payments in favor of various online games and creating payment solutions for business.
Among the partners of LeoGaming there are leading world publishers and developers of online games, payment systems (Wargaming, MasterCard, Xsolla and others), the company has its own processing center and development team. Some of the created payment solutions include an application for non-cash payments for Parking UA, chat bots for Ukrainian banks (chat-bot of the Atlas Weekend with Oschadbank), the development of a payment chat bot LeoBot, recognized as the second best p2p-transaction services by PaySpace Magazine, and much more.
In February 2018, LeoGaming entered the list of the largest fintech-companies in Ukraine according to the UNIT City and USAID.
