Money laundering

The operators of a Texas payments firm with ties to the U.K. pleaded guilty in the U.S. to money laundering failures after their business facilitated the shipping of $160 million to Nigeria over about three years.

The lender has been struggling with a series of scandals that have sent its shares to near-record lows, and may face a second criminal indictment in an unrelated case later this year.

The agency recently updated a policy document to include technological innovation as a top priority and said it was considering creating a safe harbor for those who develop new products to fight financial crimes.

A bipartisan group of senators Tuesday urged the Treasury Department and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network to speed up implementation of the Corporate Transparency Act. It's only the latest of several efforts by lawmakers urging regulators to move faster since Fincen missed the statutory implementation deadline in January.

The number of suspicious activity reports involving cryptocurrency topped 90,000 in 2021, according to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. The reason for the uptick may be that crypto is becoming more mainstream.

Citigroup has been released from a 2012 enforcement action that faulted its anti-money-laundering efforts. But company executives are expected to spend a lot of time over the next few years seeking to resolve a pair of more recent consent orders.

Deutsche Bank's offices in Frankfurt are being searched by law enforcement authorities over reports about potential money laundering that were filed by the lender.

Acting Director Himamauli Das acknowledged concerns from Democratic lawmakers that Fincen was moving too slowly to implement beneficial ownership rules but said the agency "will likely continue to do so, because our budget situation has required us to make significant trade-offs among competing priorities.”