Designated non-financial businesses and professions
SCUML supervision and DNFBP onboarding
The Special Control Unit against Money Laundering registers and supervises designated non-financial businesses and professions in Nigeria. This is also the area where we are least willing to state anything on your behalf: the category taxonomy, the identifier format, the evidence schedule and the filing duties all require current primary material, and the product is built to say so rather than to guess.
Who sets the expectation
Special Control Unit against Money Laundering (SCUML)
Registers and supervises designated non-financial businesses and professions in Nigeria for AML/CFT purposes.
Who this applies to
- Designated businesses and professions
- Businesses and professions designated under Nigerian law. Which categories are designated, and on what terms, is set by the operative Nigerian instruments — not by the international category list, which differs.
- Financial institutions banking them
- An institution taking on a designated business as a customer inherits a due diligence question about that customer's own supervisory status, and needs somewhere honest to record what it has and has not verified.
- Professional firms
- Lawyers, accountants, trust and company service providers and comparable professions, to the extent Nigerian law designates the specific services they provide.
What it requires
The obligation, stated qualitatively
Each duty below is described in substance — what it requires and what evidence it produces. Thresholds, deadlines, section numbers and penalty provisions are deliberately absent, and where a duty turns on one, the parameter you must read from the operative instrument is named beside it.
Registration with the supervisor
A designated business registers with SCUML and holds a registration identifier evidencing it.
Evidence: The registration record and the identifier as issued.
Read from the operative instrument: Which categories must register, the registration procedure, the identifier format, and whether a renewal or re-confirmation duty exists.
AML/CFT controls proportionate to the business
A designated business operates customer due diligence, record keeping and reporting arrangements appropriate to its size and the services it provides. Proportionality is real here: a two-partner firm is not expected to run a bank's programme, but it is expected to run one.
Evidence: Documented procedures, customer files with identification evidence, and a record of the decisions the procedures produced.
Read from the operative instrument: The prescribed control expectations for each designated category.
Reporting
Reporting duties for designated businesses run to the financial intelligence unit and, where required, to the supervisor.
Evidence: Submitted reports with their supporting files.
Read from the operative instrument: Which report types apply to which designated category, in what format, on what cadence, and to whom.
Record keeping
Customer and transaction records are retained and can be produced to a competent authority.
Evidence: A retention schedule and a demonstrated retrieval.
Read from the operative instrument: The retention period and its start point.
How the platform supports it
Capability, and the control it traces to
Each row below describes behaviour the product documentation records, and carries the identifier of the control-register row it traces to, so a claim can be checked rather than taken on trust.
- DNFBP as a governed classificationDNFBP is an onboarding classification and a default monitoring segment mapped onto the existing legal party kind and corporate due diligence tier. It is deliberately not a third party kind: the fields and the evidence list stay maker-checker-governed configuration a tenant can change, rather than a vendor's guess at a taxonomy baked into the schema.Control C-06
- Honest capture of an unverified registration identifierA SCUML registration identifier is optional and, when supplied, is stored exactly as given, encrypted under the party key and blind-indexed for search. It is created with no verification timestamp, no source and no assurance level; its status is explicitly supplied-and-unverified. The service fails closed if asked to verify it, because this release has no live registry adapter. Presence means only that the applicant supplied the value.Control C-05
- Evidence lists the tenant ownsThe shipped DNFBP evidence entries are optional placeholders. A tenant proposes its own required evidence through governed form configuration; the defaults deliberately do not invent a filing, registration, renewal, evidence or deadline duty.Control C-06
- Coded Nigerian addressesNigerian addresses carry a coded state and local government area drawn from a single generated artefact based on National Bureau of Statistics survey categories — 36 states with their local government areas plus the Federal Capital Territory with its area councils. Source codes and labels are preserved exactly rather than silently corrected, alternate spellings are recorded as compatibility aliases rather than as a claim about which spelling is legally correct, and a code belonging to another state is rejected.Control C-06
- Report kind present, mapping absent by designThe reporting engine carries a SCUML report kind alongside the others, and it is subject to the same rule as all of them: generation and filing stay refused until the institution supplies and accepts the authoritative schema, code lists and channel.Control C-14
What we do not claim
On a compliance product the absence of a claim is information a buyer needs as much as the presence of one.
- We do not verify SCUML registration. There is no live SCUML registry adapter in this release, and a request to verify an identifier is refused rather than answered optimistically.
- We do not publish a DNFBP category taxonomy. The business requirements this product was built from describe designated businesses but do not settle the current category list, and inventing one would be worse than leaving it to the institution.
- We do not assert a SCUML identifier format, an evidence schedule, a filing schema, a deadline or a transition rule. Those require current primary regulatory material and the institution's own legal acceptance.
- The coded address vocabulary is a statistical survey vocabulary used for consistency. It is not a claim about legal place-name spelling.
Verify before you rely on this page
This page states obligations qualitatively and carries no figures. Before acting on anything here, confirm the following against the instrument currently in force for your licence category — and record the date you checked it.
- The current list of designated categories, and whether the business in question falls into one.
- The registration procedure, the identifier format, and whether a renewal duty exists and on what cycle.
- Which reporting duties attach to which designated category, in what format and to which recipient.
- The prescribed control and record-keeping expectations for each category.
- Whether any transition or grandfathering rule currently applies to newly designated categories.
Related reading
Talk to a specialist
Onboard designated businesses without inventing the rulebook
Governed forms, honest unverified capture and coded Nigerian addresses — with the evidence list under your control rather than ours.