Communication of 14 July 2022 on amendments to Annexes 1 and 2 of Circular CSSF 20/747 relating to the accounts register (CRBA)

The CSSF hereby notifies the professionals of certain amendments to Annexes 1 and 2 of Circular CSSF 20/747 on the technical arrangements relating to the application of the Law of 25 March 2020 establishing a central electronic data retrieval system related to IBAN accounts and safe-deposit boxes held by credit institutions in Luxembourg (“the Law”).

Professionals are reminded that they are obliged to include in their data files, any information allowing the identification of all natural or legal persons who hold or control, within those professionals, payment accounts or bank accounts identified by an IBAN number, within the meaning of Article 2(15) of Regulation (EU) No 260/2012, or safe-deposit boxes, in accordance with the technical modalities of  annex 2 of Circular CSSF 20/747,  as long as those are available in their electronic systems feeding the CRBA file, notwithdstanding the generic professional obligation to conserve these data in their books, even though those might not necessarily be available in an electronic form within the professionnals’ dedicated system or application.

With regard to Annex 1, professionals are no longer required to transmit a data file on weekends, following the initial instructions in Part 4.1.1, paragraph 1 of the said Annex. Henceforth, professionals must make their data file available in the CRBA on a daily basis from Monday to Friday only, except on the days of Luxembourg public and banking holidays.

With regard to Annex 2, the new qualification as “optional” of certain identification data is a technical IT qualification (i.e. the file will in principle be accepted in the CRBA even in the absence of such technically optional data), serving purely technical standards in the CRBA. From a legal perspective, the particular data must be stored in the books of the professionals on the basis of Article 3 of the Law of 12 November 2004 on the fight against money laundering and the financing of terrorism (“AML/CFT Law”) and Article 16 of CSSF Regulation No 12-02 on the fight against money laundering and the financing of terrorism (“CSSF Regulation 12-02”). From a technical point of view, professionals have the possibility to not include the data in question in their respective data files, should the systems at their disposal and through which they make the required information available to the CSSF into the CRBA, not yet allow this reporting.

The amendments to Annex 2 specifically refer to the following:

1) The indication of the IBAN number of a payment account or a bank account becomes mandatory. Failing that, the data file will be rejected. Specifically, line 14 of Annex 2 is amended in order to only allow the reporting of the IBAN number of a bank or a payment account.

2) The reporting of the inactive status of certain accounts or safe-deposit boxes within the meaning of the Law of 30 March 2022 on inactive accounts, inactive safe-deposit boxes and unclaimed insurance policies¹, is now possible. On this basis, a new optional block has been added in Annex 2, entitled “inactive”, allowing the declaration of a payment account or a bank account identified by an IBAN number or a safe-deposit box, as inactive. More precisely, a new block of lines, from 19 to 22 referring to bank or payment accounts and from 77 to 80 referring to safe-deposit boxes, is added to Annex 2, allowing reporting into the new technically optional fields. The “isInactive” field in line 20 allows declaring an account as inactive. The “isInactive” field in line 78 is used for the declaration of a safe-deposit box as inactive. It should also be noted that it is possible to report the date from which the account or safe-deposit box is to be considered as inactive (“inactivityStartDate” line 21 and line 79 of Annex 2, respectively), as well as to specify the reasons for this inactivity (“comment” line 22 and line 80, respectively, of the said annex). The information in question does not affect the acceptance of the data file.

3) In respect of any natural person linked to a payment account or a bank account identified by an IBAN number and/or a safe-deposit box, the data:

• ‘city of birth’ (line 32 of Annex 2 and line 90, respectively, as regards safe-deposit boxes),
• ‘passport number, identity number, driving licence number’, initially designated as mandatory data under the ‘identifiers’ block of Annex 2 (lines 35 to 38 and lines 93 to 96, respectively, with regard to safe-deposit boxes in Annex 2),
• “address: street, city, postal code”,

initially designated as mandatory data, are now to be considered as optional data, from a technical point of view². The changes specifically apply to line 40 “street” and to line 98 as regards safe-deposit boxes, line 41 “city” and line 99 for safe-deposit boxes, as well as to line 44 “postal code” and finally to line 102 for safe-deposit boxes.

It is furthermore noted that, if, within Annex 2 and in relation with the data “passport number, identity number, driving licence number”, respectively, professionals specifically choose to report an official national identification number (cf. second indent above: data not mandatory from a technical point of view), they must, in addition to the number, also report the type of the identification document used. Failing that, the data file will not be accepted in the CRBA.

Example: With regards to the identification data of natural person A, a professional foreseeing to provide technically optional information on the passport of natural person A, based on the previously obtained copy. On this basis, the type of “identifier” chosen in Annexe 2 will be “passport”, which entails the obligation to additionally report the particular number of the said passport.

4) In respect of any legal person linked to a payment account or bank account identified by an IBAN number and/or a safe-deposit box:

• The fields “head office address – street, head office address – number, head office address – town, head office address – postal code”, initially designated as mandatory, are now to be considered as optional from a technical point of view. Specifically, the fields in Annex 2 “street”, “town” and “postalCode” referring to the head office (“headquarter” block: lines 59 to 65 for accounts and lines 117 to 123 for safe-deposit-boxes) and the place of business (“placeOfBusiness”: lines 66 to 72 for accounts and lines 124 to 130 for safe-deposit boxes), become technically optional³, as far as their submission in the professionals’ data file is concerned.

Professionals are reminded that, despite the optional nature, from a technical point of view, of the above-mentioned data, which may indeed not be included in the professionals’ data files, they are still obliged to include them in their data files made available to the CSSF in accordance with the instructions in Annex 2 of Circular CSSF 20/747 as soon as those are available in their respective systems.

It is further noted that the changes described above will be visible in the CRBA test environment from 15.07.2022. Professionals subject to the Law are required to implement these changes in the CRBA production environment by 15.09.2022.

With reference to the “alternative designations”, on the subject of which the CSSF issued two previous communications, the first dated 29 January 2021 and the second dated 23 November 2021, in order to deal with the exceptional and provisional use of certain technical designations within Annex 2 of Circular CSSF 20/747, so as to avoid that the absence of particular data in the file compromises the successful transmission of the entire data file to the CSSF, their application becomes further restricted following the amendments in Annex 2.

Based on the above, the only alternative designations that shall be accepted from 15.09.2022 and onwards are those corresponding to the two exceptional cases described below, where the information requested is not applicable (“not applicable” into the Annex 2 reporting):

• the beneficial owner, in the particular case of the client being a company listed on a regulated market that is subject to disclosure requirements consistent with EU law or equivalent international standards that ensure adequate transparency of ownership information;
• the company or legal entity during the process of incoporation.

Professionals are informed that any question relating to this communication may be addressed to the dedicated electronic mailbox of the CSSF: registre.compte@cssf.lu.