Fed Concerns May Be Spurring Hiring Spree Goldman Sachs Group has reportedly been on a hiring spree for back-office operations and its compliance department positions as a result of supervisory issues raised by Federal Reserve officials, according to multiple media reports, including those from Bloomberg and Reuters. The Bloomberg report noted that the firm intends… Read More >>
The Fed Will Supervise Crypto Assets & More
In early August, the Federal Reserve Board let the banks know that it is keeping an eye on their “novel activities” such as those involving crypto-assets and distributed ledger technology (DLT) otherwise known as blockchain systems. “The Federal Reserve Board on Tuesday [Aug. 8] provided additional information on its program to supervise novel activities in… Read More >>
Wells Fargo Settles Sanctions Violations Case for $97.8M
Wells Fargo Bank has settled a self-reported case of sanctions violations with two U.S. agencies — the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and the Federal Reserve — and will pay a total of $97.8 million to resolve violations of economic sanctions against Iran, Syria, and Sudan. The settlement with… Read More >>
Treasury Working Group to Explore a Digital Dollar
A working group consisting of key U.S. financial services authorities will be gathering over the coming months to investigate “an initial set of findings and recommendations” toward a central bank digital currency (CBDC) or “digital dollar” for the U.S., says Nellie Liang, under secretary for domestic finance for the Treasury Department. The CBDC Working Group… Read More >>
The Fed Issues a Crypto Warning & Other News
The Fed, FDIC & OCC Want More Crypto Controls Key U.S. regulatory agencies for financial services are creating processes that will require banking organizations to “engage in robust supervisory discussions” about proposed and current crypto-asset-related activities, according to a recently issued joint statement on risky crypto-assets. “By ‘crypto-asset,’ the agencies refer generally to any digital… Read More >>
The Fed Is Starting to Think About CBDCs
The Federal Reserve is mulling what a digital currency backed by a central bank would look like. This should come as no surprise given the onset of blockchains and distributed ledger technology, and then cryptocurrencies and digital assets in many forms. They all have had an underlying driver – a disintermediation push to bring on… Read More >>
ACA Group & Foreside Agree to Merge
Genstar to Be Majority Owner of Combined Company Governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) solutions vendors ACA Group and Foreside Financial Group have signed a definitive agreement to combine their two companies, officials say. Private equity firm Genstar Capital, which invested in Foreside earlier this year, will become the majority owner of the combined business… Read More >>
Northern Trust to Cut 500 from Global Staff
Custodian and service provider Northern Trust confirms that it will be shrinking its global workforce by approximately 500 positions, which is less than 2.5 percent of its total staff, due to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing low interest rates. The staff cuts follow Northern Trust Corp.’s report of a third-quarter net income… Read More >>
Regulators Discipline Citigroup Over Risk Management Defects
Citigroup Inc. has launched “significant remediation projects” to bolster its risk management controls, infrastructure, and governance as a result of two consent orders from federal banking regulators that found major shortcomings in Citi’s enterprise-wide risk management, compliance risk management, data governance, and internal controls. The Federal Reserve Board and the Office of the Comptroller of… Read More >>
The Fed Hits Six Banks with Record Fines
The Federal Reserve has imposed $1.8 billion in fines, “among the largest ever assessed,” against UBS, Barclays Bank, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase & Co., the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and Bank of America Corp. (BofA) for what Fed officials call “their unsafe and unsound practices in the foreign exchange (FX) markets.” The dollar amounts for… Read More >>
