Hungarian banks have received a reprieve from Parliament, which extended the deadline for mandatory authentication of all private customer identities from the original June 26th to October 31st.
Stemming from the 2015 4th EU Money Laundering Directive which came into effect on June 26th, 2017, private customers had two years to provide banks with identification and the penalty for failing to comply with the regulation is that the banks would have been compelled to freeze the accounts until such proof was given.
In the past two years, however, banks did little to notify customers of this regulation, only beginning to send messages via various channels a few weeks ahead of the deadline.
According to Rmx.news, banks were unable to handle the resulting queues and the Hungarian Banking Association asked Parliament to extend the deadline until September 31st, but Finance Minister Mihály Varga eventually submitted an amendment extending the deadline to October 31st.
This is the second time the Hungarian banking system missed a major deadline: the country was supposed to introduce instant bank transfers (as opposed to transfers lasting one to two days and only available only during working hours of banks) by June 1st, but that deadline has been extended to March 2nd, 2020.
Photo credit: rmx.news