Money laundering

In its biannual report on supervision and regulation, the Federal Reserve Board noted an uptick in governance issues with large banks. Regional and community banks, meanwhile, were plagued by IT problems and risk management struggles.

Fincen's final rule issued Tuesday allows reporting companies to use Fincen identifiers as shorthand for a full list of preapproved beneficial ownership data, which the agency says will streamline the reporting process.

The Treasury Department is expanding a whistleblower program, which currently deals only with anti-money-laundering violations, to include tips from employees of financial institutions that result in sanctions-related penalties.

U.S. Attorney Philip R. Sellinger said Oscar Marcelo Nunez-Flores, a New Jersey bank staffer of a bank unnamed in case documents, was arrested Wednesday after he allegedly took bribes to launder millions in drug money to Colombia.

As financial institutions increasingly rely on artificial intelligence for anti-money-laundering and fraud detection, they face challenges in meeting regulators' demands for complete transparency and documentation.

The Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network issued an alert Friday calling on financial institutions to closely monitor and report suspected financial activities related to Hamas, including complex cryptocurrency transactions and through fictitious charities.

The move to create data consortia and proprietary information networks is creating exactly the kind of information silos that money launderers exploit today.

Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network said most small businesses will need to report information about their beneficial owners at the start of next year; certain financial and government entities are exempt because of their preexisting regulatory requirements.

Bancrédito International Bank and Trust Corp. "willfully violated" the Bank Secrecy Act, according to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. The penalty was the first under a two-year-old federal rule aimed at closing gaps in anti-money-laundering enforcement.

The $100 million-asset bank ran afoul of various regulatory standards, including credit oversight, anti-money-laundering controls and third-party risk management.