TCSP compliance under the AMLR: nominee arrangements and the transparency agenda

If your firm provides trust or company services in Ireland — company formation, registered offices, nominee shareholdings, acting as or arranging directors — you sit exactly where the EU's anti-money laundering reform is pointing. The new single rulebook, Regulation (EU) 2024/1624 (AMLR), applies directly in Ireland from 10 July 2027. Its central theme is transparency: whoever really owns or controls a legal entity must be capable of being identified, verified and checked against a register.

Nominee arrangements are a legitimate part of the TCSP toolkit. They are also, by design, arrangements in which the person on the legal record is not the person with the real economic interest. That is precisely the gap the transparency agenda is built to close.

Why TCSPs sit at the centre of the transparency agenda

Irish TCSPs have been designated persons under the Criminal Justice (Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing) Act 2010 for over fifteen years, supervised by the Anti-Money Laundering Compliance Unit (AMLCU) in the Department of Justice. The obligations are not new. What is changing is the rulebook and the intensity behind it.

From 10 July 2027, the AMLR replaces the substantive rules your firm currently works under. It is a directly applicable EU regulation — no Irish transposition, no local variation on the core duties. Alongside it, Directive (EU) 2024/1640 (AMLD6) rebuilds the institutional layer: supervisors, FIU powers and beneficial ownership registers, with registers connected EU-wide and registrars given new verification powers. And Regulation (EU) 2024/1620 has created AMLA, the EU Anti-Money Laundering Authority in Frankfurt, operational since July 2025 and now producing the technical standards that will shape supervision on the ground.

For a sector whose services can place distance between an asset and its owner, the message is clear: structures are fine, opacity is not.

Nominee arrangements: legal service, transparency obligation

A nominee arrangement does not change who the beneficial owner is. Under the AMLR, the beneficial owner test is harmonised EU-wide at 25 per cent or more of the ownership interest, held directly or indirectly. A shareholding held through a nominee is a classic indirect interest: the person your firm holds shares for remains the beneficial owner, and every designated person dealing with that company is required to look through the nominee to identify them.

Consider a hypothetical example. Your firm incorporates a company for a client and holds all of the shares as nominee under a declaration of trust. On the share register, your firm appears. For AML purposes, nothing has changed: the client is the beneficial owner, must be identified and verified as such, and must appear in the company's beneficial ownership filings. If your firm's records, the client's account of the structure and the register do not line up, that mismatch is now a regulatory event in its own right — see below.

Two further points for planning purposes. First, the 25 per cent threshold may not be the end of the story: the Commission can lower it to as little as 15 per cent for high-risk sectors by delegated act, following a review due by 2029. Second, Ireland runs three beneficial ownership registers — the RBO for companies and industrial and provident societies, CRBOT for trusts via Revenue, and the Central Bank of Ireland register for ICAVs, unit trusts and credit unions. TCSP work routinely touches more than one of them.

The RBO check and discrepancy reporting

Since April 2021, designated persons must obtain an extract from the Register of Beneficial Ownership before entering a new business relationship, and must report discrepancies between the register and what their own due diligence finds (Regulation 20(3)(b) of SI 110/2019). For a TCSP, this cuts both ways:

• As a designated person, your firm must run the RBO check on new corporate clients, compare the extract against the beneficial ownership information the client provides, and record its conclusion — including notifying the Registrar where there is a discrepancy.
• As the service provider behind the structure, your firm is often the one holding the declaration of trust or the ownership records that other designated persons will be probing. Sloppy or stale records create discrepancy reports about your own clients.

Access to the RBO is tiered following the CJEU ruling: competent authorities have full access, while designated persons register for restricted access via the BEN3A1 form and pay a small fee per extract. There is no API — this is a documented manual workflow, and the evidence trail (extract obtained, comparison done, decision logged) is what a supervisor will want to see.

The AMLCU gets teeth before the AMLR arrives

Do not plan around July 2027 as the date pressure begins. An administrative financial sanctions regime for the AMLCU's supervised sectors — including TCSPs — has been in force since 30 June 2026 (S.I. No. 307 of 2026), and Ireland has published an AML/CFT Action Plan covering 2026–2027. Your current supervisor is being equipped to enforce the existing CJA 2010 obligations with financial consequences before the new rulebook even applies.

That sequencing matters. A firm whose risk assessment, CDD files and nominee documentation are weak today faces exposure under the current regime first, and then a rulebook change on top.

What else the AMLR changes for your firm

Beyond beneficial ownership, the AMLR brings a set of concrete changes worth building into your 2026 planning:

Suspicious Transaction Reports remain dual-track in Ireland: to FIU Ireland via the goAML portal and to the Revenue Commissioners via ROS. There is no threshold transaction reporting regime — the duty turns on suspicion, not transaction size.

What to do now

1. Map every nominee and trustee arrangement on your books. For each, confirm you can name the beneficial owner, evidence the 25 per cent analysis, and locate the underlying documentation quickly.
2. Audit your register filings. Check RBO, CRBOT and Central Bank register entries connected to structures you administer against your own records, and fix mismatches before someone else's discrepancy report finds them.
3. Embed the RBO workflow. Extract before every new business relationship, documented comparison, logged decision — with the evidence stored where an inspector can be shown it.
4. Refresh your business-wide risk assessment against the AMLR's thresholds and the transparency risks of nominee and trustee services.
5. Plan your compliance roles. Decide who will act as compliance manager and compliance officer, and document the appointments.
6. Treat the basics as due now — the AMLCU's administrative sanctions powers are already in force (since 30 June 2026).

Where CompliDesk fits

CompliDesk Ireland is being built AMLR-native for the sectors the big vendors overlook — including TCSPs under AMLCU supervision — with the RBO workflow, risk assessment and CDD thresholds mapped to Regulation (EU) 2024/1624 from day one. Start with our plain-English AMLR explainer to see what changes on 10 July 2027.