Office for Professional Body Anti-Money Laundering Supervision (OPBAS)

The Government established OPBAS as part of its reforms to strengthen the UK's anti-money laundering (AML) supervisory regime. OPBAS supervises the 25 professional body supervisors (PBSs) in the legal and accountancy sectors.

Who we are

OPBAS is housed within the FCA and our key objectives are to reduce the harm of money laundering and terrorist financing by:

1. ensuring a robust and consistently high standard of supervision by the PBSs overseeing the legal and accountancy sectors
2. facilitating collaboration and information and intelligence sharing between PBSs, statutory supervisors and law enforcement agencies

The OPBAS Regulations 2017 give us powers to ensure that PBSs meet the standards required by the Money Laundering Regulations 2017 (MLRs).

OPBAS sourcebook

Our sourcebook provides guidance for PBSs on how they can meet their obligations.

We've analysed our progress so far in our 2019, 2020, 2020/21 and 2022/23 reports.

Contacting us

If you have any questions, please email OPBAS.info@fca.org.uk.

Beware scams

If you get an email, letter or phone call from someone claiming to work for us, it’s important you consider the possibility that it could be scam. OPBAS would never ask you to transfer money to us. We would also never ask for sensitive banking information, such as bank account PINs and passwords. Find out more about fake OPBAS/FCA emails.