What is GDPR?
GDPR, known in Poland as RODO (Rozporządzenie Ogólne o Ochronie Danych Osobowych), is the General Data Protection Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council, numbered 2016/679 and dated 27 April 2016. It governs the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and the free movement of such data, and it repealed the earlier Directive 95/46/EC.
Because GDPR is an EU regulation, it applies directly in every member state without needing transposition into national law. It entered into application on 25 May 2018.
How Poland implemented it
Alongside GDPR, Poland adopted a national act to adjust domestic law and designate the competent authority. The Polish Data Protection Act of 10 May 2018 (Dz.U. 2018 poz. 1000) established the framework and the role of the President of the Personal Data Protection Office (UODO), the Polish supervisory authority.
Why it matters for AML and compliance teams
GDPR and AML obligations overlap heavily. Screening a customer involves processing personal data, and the register of beneficial owners has generated significant data protection debate. Any AML process must therefore respect the data protection principles of lawfulness, purpose limitation, minimisation and accountability, in addition to the AML rules themselves.
The practical consequences that come up most often:
- a lawful basis and a defined purpose for every screening or monitoring activity
- data minimisation, so that only the data actually needed is processed
- a data protection impact assessment for high-risk processing
- retention limits, balanced against AML record-keeping duties
For teams that need to run screening and monitoring while keeping the data protection side documented, a platform such as Hyperflow helps keep processing purpose-bound and auditable.
UK perspective
The UK maintains equivalent rules through the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, supervised by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). The principles described above apply in the same way.