TRACFIN: what it is and how to file a déclaration de soupçon

In France, money-laundering and terrorism-financing intelligence flows to a single national agency: TRACFIN. Every PSP authorised in France or operating into France on a Freedom-of-Services basis files déclarations de soupçon with TRACFIN through its dedicated portal — separately from any prudential reporting to the ACPR. The procedural rules are tighter than the EU floor, the threshold for a soupçon is narrower than the Dutch unusual-transaction test, and the personal exposure of the named déclarant is real. This is the operational walkthrough.

1. What TRACFIN is

TRACFIN — Traitement du renseignement et action contre les circuits financiers clandestins — is France’s financial-intelligence unit, administratively attached to the Ministry of Economy and Finance but operationally independent. Its mandate sits in the Code monétaire et financier (CMF), Articles L.561-1 and following, transposing the EU AML directives.

TRACFIN receives suspicious-activity reports from obligated subjects (professionnels assujettis), analyses and enriches them with intelligence from partner agencies, and disseminates to the prosecutor, police or fiscal authorities. It is the functional equivalent of SEPBLAC in Spain — with one structural difference: TRACFIN is purely an intelligence unit and does not supervise. Supervision sits with the ACPR (and the AMF for investment-services firms).

2. Who must file

Article L.561-2 CMF lists the obligated subjects. For a fintech audience the relevant categories are:

• Credit institutions and branches of foreign credit institutions
• Electronic-money institutions and payment institutions, including those passporting in
• Investment service providers under MiFID II
• Crypto-asset service providers (PSAN under the prior regime, CASPs under MiCA)
• Crowdfunding service providers
• Notaries, lawyers, accountants and other regulated professionals for regulated transactions

For a passporting EMI or PI, the obligation attaches to the activity carried on in France — see AML representative across the EU for how the named-person obligation interacts with passporting.

3. The two named roles — déclarant and correspondant

• Déclarant TRACFIN — the signatory of every déclaration de soupçon, with authority to commit the firm to the filing. France-resident expected.
• Correspondant TRACFIN — the day-to-day liaison who receives intelligence requests and operational communications. Often distinct from the déclarant, though small firms combine the roles.

Both are notified to TRACFIN through the ERMES portal at appointment, and changes are notified promptly thereafter.

4. What constitutes a soupçon

Articles L.561-15 and following set the reportable categories:

• Sums or operations the firm knows, suspects, or has reasonable grounds to suspect derive from offences punishable by more than a year of imprisonment, from tax fraud, or from terrorism financing
• Operations whose economic justification or lawful purpose is not apparent
• Operations that are particularly complex, unusually large, or carried out in unusual circumstances
• Operations involving high-risk jurisdictions on the EU or French lists

Operationally: transaction-monitoring rules detect candidates, a human investigator triages, the déclarant signs off after internal investigation, and the SAR is filed.

Facts: a French-authorised EMI sees a newly onboarded personal account receive a dozen incoming transfers from unrelated senders over ten days, each just under €1,000, with near-immediate onward transfers abroad. The customer’s stated profile is a student with no declared income.

What the rule says: the pattern has no apparent economic justification and matches a classic mule typology — that is “reasons to suspect” under L.561-15, and the absence of proof of an underlying offence is irrelevant; suspicion, not evidence, is the filing standard.

What the practitioner does: the analyst documents the pattern and the profile mismatch, the déclarant approves, and the SAR goes to TRACFIN without waiting for the investigation to be “complete”. Whether to exit the customer is a separate decision, taken so as not to reveal the filing.

5. The ERMES portal

TRACFIN’s intake is the ERMES portal — a structured electronic submission channel: sign-on for the named déclarant, structured SAR forms with narrative free-text fields, file attachments, acknowledgement of receipt with a TRACFIN reference, and two-way messaging for follow-up requests. Unlike the Spanish arrangement for non-banks (see how to file a SAR in Spain), ERMES is a single channel for all obligated subjects regardless of size.

6. Timing — without delay

The standard is “sans délai” — without delay. There is no fixed number of days; the firm must show that internal review and submission ran on a timeline proportionate to the seriousness of the suspicion. In practice: genuine red-flag SARs go within hours; investigation-derived SARs within days of the investigation closing; persistently late filings invite a TRACFIN data-quality review and ACPR follow-up.

Facts: an alert fires on a Friday; the case sits in a queue for three weeks because the compliance team is migrating its case-management tool; the SAR is eventually filed in week four.

What comes back: “without delay” is judged against the moment the firm had reasons to suspect — the alert date, not the filing date. A three-week internal queue is a framework deficiency, and in an ACPR inspection the sample will surface it.

What the practitioner does: sets internal SLAs from alert to decision, monitors queue ageing as a KPI, and documents any exceptional delay contemporaneously. The defence file for timing is built before anyone asks.

7. Tipping-off and confidentiality

It is a criminal offence to reveal to the customer (or the customer’s adviser) that a SAR has been filed or is being considered — the CMF prohibition carries imprisonment and a fine. The prohibition covers the firm’s communications, analyst notes accessible to the customer, and any disclosure that could reveal the SAR’s existence.

Facts: after a SAR is filed, the firm freezes outgoing transfers pending review. The customer calls support and is told the account is “under anti-money-laundering investigation following a report”.

What the rule says: that sentence is tipping-off. The offence does not require intent to help the customer — revealing the existence of the report is enough.

What the practitioner does: scripts support responses for restricted accounts in neutral terms (“additional verification of your account is in progress”), restricts SAR visibility in internal systems on a need-to-know basis, and trains front-line staff on what may never be said.

8. SARs versus systematic reporting

French law also imposes systematic reporting of certain operations regardless of suspicion — the communications systématiques d’informations (COSI) under Article L.561-15-1, covering transaction categories defined in regulation. They ride the same ERMES infrastructure as a different submission type. The Spanish equivalent is the DMO.

9. ACPR’s role

TRACFIN receives and analyses; the ACPR supervises whether the firm has the framework to detect and file. ACPR inspections sample alert investigations and the SAR track record; TRACFIN’s feedback on filing quality feeds supervisory ratings; and sanctions for AML failures sit with the ACPR’s Sanctions Commission — where the named déclarant can be sanctioned personally.

10. FAQ

11. What to do, today

• MLRO: designate the déclarant and correspondant before French activity starts, and notify TRACFIN through ERMES.
• Compliance ops: document the SAR workflow end-to-end — trigger, investigation, decision, filing, record — with internal SLAs from alert to decision.
• TM engineers: tune monitoring rules to the French soupçon threshold, not a standard imported from another member state.
• Support leads: script restricted-account responses so no front-line message can ever amount to tipping-off.
• Group MLRO: coordinate French SARs with home-state filings — a single transaction may be reportable in both streams.

Related: French AML framework beyond TRACFIN · AML representative across the EU · How to file a SAR in Spain · What is SEPBLAC? · How to file a SAR in Luxembourg (CRF, goAML) · AMLA cross-border STR routing · Funds transfer information under Reg 2023/1113