Do the SEC and the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) need to tighten up anti-money-laundering (AML) and countering-the-financing-of-terrorism (CFT) requirements? You don’t need to know the lyrics to “Tighten Up,” by Houston’s Archie Bell & the Drells, to puzzle out the answer. It does. The SEC’s Division of Examinations (a.k.a. EXAMS) oversees broker-dealers and… Read More >>
Jury Convicts Key Player in Malaysian Fund Scandal
A federal jury recently found a former Goldman Sachs managing director guilty of bribing government officials to secure lucrative deals through the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) investment and development fund, as well as guilty of laundering the proceeds on a massive scale. Following an eight-week trial, the jury in the Eastern District of New York… Read More >>
NatWest Pleads Guilty to Money-Laundering Violations
A large bank is guilty of violating the United Kingdom’s money-laundering regulations. Says who? Says the bank itself. FTF News readers, who are familiar with all the ploys financial institutions employ to avoid saying they’ve done wrong (all that neither-confirming-nor-denying while paying up and agreeing to be censured), will know just how unusual that is…. Read More >>
Money Laundering Analysis Needs AI & ML: Q&A
(Editor’s note: False positives are a problem for financial services firms implementing know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) systems, says Arin Ray, a senior analyst with the Securities and Investments practice of market research firm Celent, a division of Oliver Wyman. Ray is the author of the recent Celent report, “Applying Advanced Analytics… Read More >>
AML Costs Hit $14.3M Per Large U.S. Firm
Complying with anti-money laundering (AML) regulations costs financial services firms based in the United States and Canada more than $31.5 billion per year. That is the conclusion drawn by a recent report from LexisNexis Risk Solutions. The report, entitled “The True Cost of Anti-Money Laundering Compliance in the United States and Canada,” is derived from… Read More >>
NICE Actimize Embraces Disruptive IT to Fight Crime
(Editor’s note: The Best Financial Crime Prevention Technology honor from the FTF News Technology Innovation Awards for 2019 went to NICE Actimize and its portfolio of financial crime solutions. Voters singled out the company for the five major financial crime solutions that it launched in 2018 with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) central… Read More >>
Global Markets Losing the AML War: Report
Anti-money-laundering (AML) processes and procedures dominate the global regulatory environment. That is the generally accepted view, of course, which is cogently expressed in a new report, “Global Regulatory Outlook 2019: Are We There Yet?” from Duff & Phelps, a consultancy for financial services firms. And yet, the consultancy continues, the battle to curb money-laundering (and… Read More >>
Bitcoin Broker Pays $990K Penalty for Alleged Violations
A brokerage located in the Marshall Islands, 1pool Ltd., and Patrick Brunner, its owner and CEO, are paying a $990,000 civil penalty to resolve a CFTC consent order charging them in federal court with making “illegal bitcoin-related transactions,” failing to register as a futures commission merchant (FCM) and “failing to meet its supervisory duties by… Read More >>
Fenergo Tool Shows Structure of Money-Laundering Schemes
Fenergo, a client lifecycle management (CLM) vendor, has launched an ultimate beneficial ownership (UBO) and counterparty hierarchy modeling and visualization tool, the Fenergo Hierarchy Manager (FHM), intended to streamline anti-money laundering (AML) screenings, and to help financial services firms better mitigate the risks of financial crime. The new FHM offers financial institutions “a single aggregated… Read More >>
FINRA Alleges LPL Failed to Submit 400+ SARs
Boston-based LPL Financial has been fined $2.75 million by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) on charges that, among other problems, its anti-money laundering (AML) efforts failed to assess approximately 400 incidents that should have been investigated as Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs). In addition, FINRA alleges that LPL “failed to file or amend registered representatives’… Read More >>
