Money laundering

The Toronto bank has been under investigation by U.S. and Canadian supervisors for alleged shortcomings in anti-money-laundering compliance. CEO Bharat Masrani pledged "comprehensive enhancements" but declined to pinpoint the exact fixes and their costs.

Bharat Masrani has spent a decade as the Canadian bank's top executive and is pushing 70. But as the bank undergoes a U.S. Justice Department probe, it's unclear when he'll step down or who's next in line.

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network Tuesday proposed a rule to include investment advisors in the compliance regime under the Bank Secrecy Act, aiming to close regulatory gaps exploited by criminals.

The Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network fined a New York credit union employee $100,000 Wednesday in connection with a scheme to launder $1 billion using armored trucks and the credit union's Fed master account.

January is Human Trafficking Prevention Month, and the financial services industry should take the opportunity to step up for survivors.

The leader of the Financial Services Forum takes issue with a recent BankThink article that challenged the industry's claims about proposed rules for implementing the Basel endgame capital requirements.

The Federal Reserve and New York State Department of Financial Services fined the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China for violations related to a lack of internal controls for confidential supervisory information and anti-money-laundering compliance failures.

Past crises have created opportunities for criminal organizations to inject their funds into the legitimate banking system. Bankers can't allow that to happen again.

Who counts as a politically exposed person, or PEP, is different in different jurisdictions. Uniformity in the identification of people considered a higher risk for money laundering would ease compliance headaches for everyone.

Banks cannot shrug off the impact of sudden account closures as inevitable collateral damage involved in fighting money laundering.

Bank customers' complaints of sudden account closures track a rise in automated anti-money-laundering decisions and possibly outdated AML rules.

The platform will allow banks to share the names and account information of suspected scammers almost in real time. The American Bankers Association is set to test the system with a group of 20 pilot banks early next year.

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.