SARs Reform: what the new information-sharing gateway means in practice
Part 5 of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 introduced a gateway allowing firms in the regulated sector to share information for the purposes of preventing, detecting or investigating economic crime. The gateway is permissive rather than mandatory, and the operational conditions — the safeguards, the record-keeping and the interaction with data protection law — must be worked through before a firm can rely on it. We set out a governance framework for firms considering participation and cover the interaction with the ongoing Public-Private Partnership work led by the NCA.
What the gateway does
It permits — but does not require — regulated firms to share customer information with one another for defined economic-crime purposes, with statutory protection against breach-of-confidence and data-protection claims where the conditions are met.
The operational conditions
Firms must have a lawful basis for the processing, a defensible record of the sharing decision, and a governance route that authorises the disclosure at the right level of seniority. A single-page policy will not be enough.