compliance

So, that's done. The Financial Crime Forum for those thinking about joining financial crime risk and compliance and those at an early stage in their careers just wrapped up. Thanks to our speakers and to all those that attended.

The USA's Securities and Exchange Commission has issued proceedings against Jose Luis Casero Sanchez alleging insider trading. That's not the interesting stuff.

Morningstar has been mounting a persistent advertising campaign on LinkedIn recently. It it, it promotes its due diligence services. An announcement by the USA's Securities and Exchange Commission raises several questions, not the least of which is "who or what is Morningstar"?

16 February: This offer has now expired.

Our sister venture, Financial Crime Risk and Compliance Training, has released a micro-course about Deutsche Bank, the New York Department of Financial Services and Jeffery Epstein.

The case creates a new class of risk for all regulated businesses everywhere in the world. There is an early bird discount.

It's there. In plain sight. In the body of the press release from the Australian Securities and Investment Commission. It's a statement that ASIC, having been found, damned by its own words and those of the industry, wanting in its supervision of the Financial Services Landscape, is taking the gloves off. It's not going to stand for any more poor compliance. It's going to make "ongoing efforts to improve standards across the financial services industry." So this case is going to be spectacular, isn't it?

"Need more help?" says the PayPal page. Another quality control failure....

In or about 2003, I closed our publishing company's account with PayPal because they kept blocking the account. At the time, PayPal wasn't the enormous global powerhouse that it has become. It was, essentially, a bunch of nerds for whom compliance and risk management was a nuisance. When electronic money started to exercise the US government's collective mind, PayPal found that it needed some risk management processes. They didn't do it properly. Then, later, when PayPal expanded into Europe, it migrated our account to its EU operations and put money laundering, etc. risk and compliance in Dublin where they set up systems that were not only rubbish but sent out letters referring to non-existent legislation. But now, a piece of essential third party produced software is pushing us towards at least opening, even if we don't use it, a PayPal account. How hard can it be? Surely they have learned something in...

Hong Kong's Securities and Futures Commission has suspended the former responsible officer of China Merchants Securities (HK) Co., Limited for compliance failures.

On 19th April, Australia's newest national bank, Members' Equity Bank a.k.a. ME Bank, announced that it was to increase its interest rates on existing home loans, with effect from 19th April. Then it made a silly error. Given that the banking sector in Australia is under the most intense scrutiny and that it would be logical to assume that, if at any time, this is the time where banks will double, triple even quadruple check their actions, the stupidity of the error raises a serious question: is the financial sector in Australia simply under-skilled and, therefore, unfit for purpose?

One has to ask what took so long.. after American regulators and prosecutors began attacking European banks for failures in the USA European regulators remained surprisingly reticent about taking action against foreign banks, especially American banks. While it may not be blowback (US banks have long gone their own way in London, as have German and Japanese banks but there have been occasional action against those) it is certainly time that US banks were not treated as a special case. In the latest example, Merrill Lynch has been ordered to pay a penalty that, relative to the scale of the failure and corresponding penalties in the USA, seems relatively small.