Off the Grey List, Not Off the Hook: What the New AML Bill Means for Estate Agencies

On 24 October 2025, South Africa's revenue and financial intelligence authorities confirmed what compliance officers across the country had been waiting more than two and a half years for: the Financial Action Task Force had removed South Africa from its grey list. For an agency principal who had spent 2024 and 2025 hearing "FICA" in every PPRA circular and every FIC directive, the news felt like an exhale. The pressure, surely, was finally off.

It is worth being precise about what actually happened next, because the exhale was premature. Within three months of that announcement, National Treasury had already published a new bill in the Government Gazette, aimed squarely at the accountable institutions, estate agencies included, that FATF still considers the weak link in South Africa's anti-money laundering system. That bill is now before Parliament. It does not loosen anything. If it passes as drafted, it hands the Financial Intelligence Centre and the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC) sharper tools than they have ever had to check whether your compliance file matches what you actually did.

Why the grey list exit didn't lower the bar

South Africa was placed on the FATF grey list in February 2023, after the 2021 Mutual Evaluation Report found systemic weaknesses in how the country identified, investigated, and prosecuted money laundering and terrorism financing. Getting off that list required completing 22 specific action items agreed with FATF, covering everything from beneficial ownership transparency to the effectiveness of supervision over accountable institutions like estate agencies. By October 2025, FATF was satisfied enough with the progress to delist the country.

That distinction matters more to an individual estate agency than the plenary announcement did. A country can pass a law. Whether a law changes behaviour at the level of a single agent onboarding a single buyer is a different question entirely, and it is the question FATF's follow-up process is designed to keep asking. The General Laws Amendment Bill now working its way through Parliament exists because Treasury does not want to arrive at the 2027 evaluation with the same answer as before.

The bill already moving through Parliament

The Draft General Laws (Anti-Money Laundering and Combating Terrorism Financing) Amendment Bill was published for public comment on 14 January 2026. The original comment window, due to close on 13 February, was extended to 2 March 2026 after industry bodies asked for more time to respond. Treasury formally introduced the Bill in the National Assembly on 17 April 2026, alongside its explanatory summary, and it remains before Parliament as of this year's parliamentary session.

The Bill is an omnibus amendment, touching the Financial Intelligence Centre Act, the Companies Act, the Financial Sector Regulation Act, and the Nonprofit Organisations Act. Its stated purpose is to close the remaining gaps identified in the 2021 Mutual Evaluation Report before the next evaluation cycle begins. For estate agencies, which sit inside FICA's Schedule 1 as accountable institutions, several of its provisions land directly on the desk of whoever runs client due diligence.

1Anonymous or falsely named clients become a bright line

The Bill amends the FIC Act so that an accountable institution is treated as non-compliant, and exposed to administrative sanction, if it conducts business with a client whose identity is anonymous or has been given under a false name. That sounds like it should already be obvious. In practice, it closes a grey area that some institutions have relied on: onboarding first and completing verification later, or accepting a plausible-looking ID document without checking it against an authoritative source.

For an agency, the practical shift is that "we were still in the process of verifying them" stops being a defensible position once a transaction has actually proceeded. Identity verification against Home Affairs, not just a photograph of a document, needs to sit at the start of the file, not somewhere in the middle of it.

2CIPC gets real teeth over company and trust registers

The Companies Act amendments give CIPC the power to deregister a company that fails to file its securities register or beneficial ownership register, and to impose administrative fines of either 10% of the company's turnover during the period of non-compliance, or a minimum of R10 million, whichever is greater. The Companies Tribunal can review and adjust the amount, but the floor itself is new, and it is high.

This changes what "checking a corporate buyer" should mean for an agency. Establishing who the beneficial owners of a purchasing entity are is one exercise. Confirming that the entity itself is in good standing at CIPC, with its registers actually filed and current, is a second and separate one, and it now carries real consequences if skipped. A company facing a multi-million-rand fine or deregistration for a stale register is not a clean counterparty to be transacting property through, whatever its beneficial ownership turns out to be.

3Sanctions screening picks up a property-specific layer

The Bill introduces a requirement to report property owned by persons listed under United Nations Security Council sanctions. This sits alongside, rather than replaces, the existing obligation to screen clients against sanctions and politically exposed persons (PEP) lists at onboarding. The practical addition is that the question is no longer only "is my client sanctioned," but also "is the property itself linked, through ownership history or a related party, to someone who is."

For most residential transactions this will never come up. For agencies working in higher-value markets, or with corporate and trust-held property, it is one more reason sanctions and PEP screening needs to run on a refreshed, ongoing basis rather than as a once-off box ticked at first contact.

4Lifestyle audits move a step closer to property transactions

One of the more discussed provisions expands the FIC's power to conduct lifestyle audits. Currently, the FIC can generally only pursue this kind of audit once it already suspects a specific transaction. The Bill allows government entities, municipalities, departments, regulators, and other public bodies, to request a lifestyle audit even without a prior suspicious transaction report, where there is a mismatch between someone's declared income and their apparent standard of living. The Bill builds in safeguards: the requesting entity needs a legitimate interest, must comply with POPIA, and carries the notification obligation itself rather than passing it to the FIC.

5Nonprofit-linked property deals get sharper scrutiny too

The Bill also strengthens the Nonprofit Organisations Act, giving the NPO Directorate expanded monitoring and enforcement powers, with penalties of up to R1 million and five years' imprisonment for serious non-compliance. This is not aimed at estate agencies directly, but agencies that handle property transactions involving NPOs, community land trusts, or NPO-linked trustees should expect the same level of scrutiny applied to those clients as to any company or trust, not a lighter one because the counterparty is framed as a nonprofit.

6The pattern across every one of these changes is the same

Read the Bill's provisions together and a single theme runs through all of them: regulators want current, verifiable, retrievable evidence, not an annual snapshot or a policy document that describes what should happen. CIPC wants registers that are actually filed, not filed once and forgotten. The FIC wants identity verification completed before a transaction proceeds, not reconstructed afterward. Sanctions screening needs to catch property-linked exposure, not just the named client. None of this is answered by writing a better policy. It is answered by a process that produces evidence automatically, every time, without relying on someone remembering to do the paperwork.

The grey list was never really a judgment on South Africa's laws. It was a judgment on whether the country's institutions could show, case by case, that those laws actually changed what happened at the counter. That same test now runs one agency, one file, one transaction at a time, and it does not end just because the country's name came off a list.

7What this means for your RMCP right now

FATF's remaining ask of South Africa is effectiveness, not paperwork, and the FIC's supervisory approach is following that lead. Expect inspections that ask to see evidence of action rather than a copy of your Risk Management and Compliance Programme (RMCP). Three things are worth doing before this Bill is enacted, not after: confirm your RMCP has actually been reviewed since the draft Bill was published in January 2026, confirm your compliance officer role has real authority rather than existing on an organogram, and confirm you could produce, on request and without a scramble, evidence of identity verification, beneficial ownership, and sanctions screening for any file currently open.

Where this leaves most agencies

None of this means the sky is falling, and it does not mean South Africa is at risk of returning to the grey list overnight. It means the standard has moved from "do you have the right policy" to "can you prove, for this specific file, that the policy was actually followed." That is a higher bar, but it is also a more mechanical one, and mechanical problems are the easiest kind to solve with the right process rather than more effort from already-stretched staff.

This is exactly the gap Lucere was built to close: identity verification against Home Affairs, beneficial ownership declaration and screening for company and trust clients, sanctions and PEP checks that run on an ongoing basis rather than once at onboarding, and an audit pack that exports in one click instead of getting assembled by hand the week before an inspection. The Bill now before Parliament is a preview of where FIC and PPRA scrutiny is heading. The agencies that treat it as an early warning, rather than background noise from a headline they have already stopped reading, will be the ones with nothing to reconstruct when someone finally asks.