Transparency International (TI) is a global civil society organisation, founded in Berlin in 1993, dedicated to combating corruption worldwide. It is not a governmental, regulatory, or law enforcement body — it has no formal legal authority and cannot impose sanctions or bring enforcement actions. Instead, TI operates through research, advocacy, and public reporting, working through a network of national chapters in more than 100 countries to monitor corruption levels, advocate for stronger anti-corruption laws and institutions, and hold governments and businesses accountable through public pressure and transparency initiatives.
TI’s most widely referenced output, and the one most relevant to financial crime compliance professionals, is the annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), which ranks countries according to perceived levels of public sector corruption based on an aggregation of data from multiple independent sources, including expert assessments and surveys of business executives. While the CPI measures perceived rather than directly proven corruption, and is not a legal or regulatory designation in the way that an EU high-risk third country list is, it is nonetheless widely used by compliance teams as one input — among several — when assessing country risk, particularly in relation to corruption-related red flags, PEP risk, and the plausibility of a customer’s declared source of wealth. A customer connected to a jurisdiction ranking very poorly on the CPI is not automatically high risk, but the index provides useful contextual evidence that should be weighed alongside formal regulatory lists and other risk indicators when forming an overall risk assessment.
Link: TI website https://www.transparency.org/en
