Corporate services providers, also called trust and company service providers, are the industrial layer of corporate concealment. They are regulated in most jurisdictions and the overwhelming majority of their work is unremarkable.
The risk concentrates where one provider performs every role in a structure: forming the company, providing its directors and shareholders, holding its records, opening its bank accounts and drafting the contracts it signs. At that point there is no independent party anywhere in the arrangement, and FATF’s professional money laundering study treats that concentration as the defining feature of a professional enabler rather than a service provider.