The Planning Institute of Jamaica reported a sharp increase in attorneys registering on the goAML reporting platform — 1,018 as at December 2024, a 329% rise year on year. That number matters beyond the legal profession, because it signals that supervision of designated non-financial businesses and professions has genuine momentum.
For firms newly inside the perimeter, the obligations are concrete: risk assessment, customer due diligence proportionate to that risk, record keeping, a nominated officer, suspicious transaction reporting and periodic independent testing of the programme.
Microcredit, remittance and cambio operators went through this earlier and reported the real cost sits in systems and monitoring rather than policy drafting. That experience is worth borrowing: buy the screening and monitoring capability before paying for a thick manual nobody follows.
Independent testing is where an audit-grade firm is genuinely useful, since the reviewer should not be the party that built the programme.