Effective Oct. 1, 2025, all reporting entities regulated by Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) must comply with new beneficial ownership and discrepancy reporting obligations under the Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist Financing Act (PCMLTFA).
What the New Regulation Requires:
- All reporting entities regulated by FINTRAC will be required to report to Corporations Canada any material discrepancies identified between the beneficial ownership information that they have obtained and the individuals with significant control (ISC) information available in Corporations Canada’s database.
- The reporting is required when the reporting entity determines that an active corporation incorporated under the Canada Business Corporations Act (CBCA) poses a high risk of a money laundering offence or terrorist activity financing offence.
- Reporting to Corporations Canada is required within 30 days of identification.1
What You Need to Do:
- Step 1: Gather beneficial ownership information from your customer.
- Step 2: For federally incorporated entities, compare the information collected against Corporation Canada’s registry, which you can obtain through ESC’s Corporate Searches.
- Step 3: If the Federal entity is deemed high risk, and a material discrepancy of beneficial ownership is identified, you need to report it to Corporation Canada within 30 days.
For individual identity verification, ESC offers a secure non-face-to-face ID verification service to support meeting FINTRAC ID verification requirements.
How ESC Can Support You in Meeting FINTRAC Compliance
- Accurate business data verification – ESC’s Legal Entity Validator (LEV) offers direct connectivity to all Canadian Corporate Registries to confirm the existence, jurisdiction and status of corporate and business entities, access critical corporate details including beneficial ownership, and comply with Know-Your-Business (KYB) obligation.
- Secure non-face-to-face ID verification – ESC’s Secure Identification Network for Individuals (SIDni) solution verifies individuals in a non-face-to-face context using multiple authoritative verification methods to achieve a higher pass rate, ensuring compliance with FINTRAC guidelines and meeting your Know-Your-Customer (KYC) obligations, while offering a seamless verification process.
- Beneficial ownership to be included in ESC’s COVR reports and via API
In addition to beneficial ownership information being included in Corporate Profile reports for Federal, Quebec and other jurisdictions when provided by provincial registries, ESC’s standardized customer onboarding verification report (COVR) will be updated to summarize key ownership information within the report, providing an easy-to-access, convenient source for critical data.
ESC customers who access services via ESC’s most recent API Legal Entity Validator (LEV), will now be able to obtain beneficial ownership information. Please contact sales@eservicecorp.ca for system specifications to ensure you can accept the new data fields.Â
- End-to-end KYC attestation and reporting solution
Reporting entities can simplify the onboarding and ongoing risk management process by utilizing ESC’s attestation workflow solution to gather beneficial ownership information and other important KYC verification steps, which helps reporting entities meet PCMLTFA and AML regulatory requirements.
Please contact our team at sales@eservicecorp.ca to learn more about how ESC’s Attestanet solution can be integrated into your workflow.
- Save time and effort with batch processing
ESC’s batch processing capability allows you to automate verification for multiple entities simultaneously, providing efficiencies and insights into your portfolios.
For more details about beneficial ownership requirements and reporting obligations, please see the official guidance from Corporations Canada here.
1Corporations Canada: Beneficial ownership discrepancy reporting
