Many forms of criminal activity generate significant amounts of money. To avoid attracting the attention of law enforcement, criminals must find a way to disguise the source of their ill-gotten funds. That’s the goal of money laundering, which involves criminals engaging in a series of transactions to conceal the criminal origins of their money.

Money laundering involves three stages:

1. A criminal (or those under their direction) introduces funds earned through criminal activity to the financial system.
2. A money launderer (or the criminal themselves) engages in a series of transactions to create layers between the illegal source of the cash they control.
3. The criminal moves laundered money back into the financial system.

The layering process

During the layering stage, the goal is to disconnect the money from the illegal activity that generated it. Generally, the more layers money passes through, the harder it becomes to connect the funds to criminal activity.

The goal of layering is to make the process of tracking money through each layer more difficult to accomplish. Layering can include changing the nature of the assets, i.e. cash, gold, casino chips, real-estate, etc.

Complex layering schemes involve sending the money around the globe using a series of transactions. The more countries the money enters and leaves, the harder it is to uncover the “dirty” source of the money.

Layering and AML

A complex layering scheme makes anti-money laundering (AML) operations challenging. Since they lack jurisdiction overseas, law enforcement must coordinate with their foreign counterparts, which can delay the tracking of the funds while complicating the document trail associated with the funds.

To complicate matters further, criminals often use shell companies, which engage in fraudulent transactions, such as the creation of fake invoices. Once the company receives payment for the fake invoice, those who control the shell company can return the proceeds or send them to another shell company as payment for a subsequent fake invoice.

Layering can involve electronic transactions such as wires and ACHs, paper transactions, and/or manual movement of the funds between countries using covert means. Those laundering the funds may also decide to use non-traditional financial systems, such as Hawala (Middle East), Hundi (India), or Hui Kuan (Hong Kong), which are alternative remittance systems that allow for the movement of money without doing so physically.

Nowadays, online business has taken a place at the top of all kinds of business delivery systems. It has created a new era in the arena of shopping and delivery. The most incredible thing in this regard is that you don’t have to even get to the shop but you can order your desired furniture from your favorite shop. There are some shops which are very famous for their quality as well as services. Therefore they have taken their business to a different level through their online services. The online agencies have also brought a feature where you can buy things from any Furniture store in Zurich and they will deliver your desired furniture after some days. Not only this, there are different offers from the inline stores which you can’t get anywhere if you buy the furniture physically.

In any Furniture store in Zurich, you will get some specifications regarding the furniture while you go there to buy them. Here are some such specifications which make specifications of furniture.

1. Furniture for Living Room

A living room is the gathering place of any house. Here the family members meet with the guests mostly. In most of the houses, the family members also gather there and enjoy their time with each other. This is the entry point of any household and therefore the members try to decorate this room very carefully. You can understand the values of a family from the living room of their house. Any furniture store in Zurich, that in Möbelgeschäft in Zürich in German, therefore, is the best place to buy your kinds of furniture. If you want to decorate this room in a classical style, then you will get those kinds of furniture from there. On the other hand, there are neo-classical as well as modern furniture too.

2. Dining Room

The dining room is the heart of the family. Even if a family member is very busy with work, they still will come to this room to eat meals. Therefore you need to decorate this room very minutely. The actual feel to have a good meal is when the furniture and fixtures are properly arranged there. If you are inviting your friends and peers for dinner, then the decoration of the room should definitely reflect a good aura to them so that they can enjoy their food.

3. Furniture for Bedroom

A bedroom is a place of peace for everyone. Whatever you are going through throughout the day, the bedroom will help you to forget everything once you get there. You should also select the room furniture very carefully since you have to get there at the end of the day. A Furniture Store in Zurich can supply you with every kind of furniture that you require in your bedroom. Beds, cupboards, dressing tables and other furniture are available there at the most reasonable prices. You won’t have to search much for your desired furniture there and you can get the most useful one for your bedroom.

Details in press conference On Friday, Germany’s second-largest Volksbank confirmed corresponding reports by the magazine “Spiegel” and the “Welt am Sonntag”. Details will be announced by the two banks in a joint press conference next Tuesday (3.9.).

The cooperation is a response to the pressure to save money and could therefore set a precedent nationwide. Because the entire industry strives to create a balancing act between digital offers and presence in the area.

Many customers now do their banking business almost exclusively on their home computer or via an app on their smartphone. The number of branches has been shrinking for years because the dense network costs the institutions a lot of money – and this at a time when financial institutions are already struggling to earn money because of the low-interest rates and at the same time have to spend a lot of money on regulation and new digital services.

50 locations affected According to reports, Frankfurter Volksbank and Taunus Sparkasse will consolidate their presence at 50 locations. The joint branches will be open on four weekdays: Sparkassen customers will be served on two days, Volksbank customers on the other two days.

Customers will be able to see which institution is currently represented by means of different lighting – sometimes red for the Sparkasse, sometimes blue for the Volksbank. Basic services such as cash withdrawals are to be offered to all customers at all times via ATMs.

The two institutes are jointly investing up to five million euros in the redesign of the branches – and in return are saving annual costs in the single-digit millions.

Last year, branch deaths and merger pressure in the German banking market continued under the pressure of the interest rate slump and digitization. According to Bundesbank figures, the number of financial institutions decreased by 40 to 1,783 compared to the previous year. The number of branch offices shrank across the entire German market by 2,239 to 27,887. In 2007, the figure was still around 40,000.

Eva Wunsch-Weber, CEO of Frankfurter Volksbank, had already shown herself open to cooperation when presenting her company’s balance sheet. The cooperative bank also relied on cooperation with savings banks “in order to be accessible to our customers at less frequented locations”, explained Wunsch-Weber in mid-February.

Frankfurter Volksbank has around 1,600 employees and serves more than 600,000 private customers. With a balance sheet total of around EUR 12.1 billion, the bank is Germany’s second-largest Volksbank after Berliner Volksbank.

According to an overview by the German Savings Banks and Giro Association (DSGV), Taunus Sparkasse, with a balance sheet total of more than 5.5 billion euros, is ranked 49th among the last 385 savings banks in Germany. The institute employs a good 800 staff.

Branch network also under scrutiny at other banks Not only Volksbanks and savings banks but also large private banks such as Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank are constantly scrutinizing the branch network. According to a report by “Wirtschaftswoche”, Deutsche Bank is considering closing a larger number of branches of Deutsche Bank and Postbank as part of its announced radical restructuring of the Group. We are talking about 200 branches.

A Deutsche Bank spokesman said on Friday on request that the bank was currently reviewing a number of additional measures “to achieve the goals set for the retail bank by 2022 more quickly and to set new impulses for its customers”. Deutsche Bank had reduced the number of its own branches by 188 in recent years to 535, while Postbank currently operates 850 of its own branches.