News

Germany’s financial intelligence unit has cleared a backlog of thousands of unprocessed suspicious transaction reports, or STRs, but still faces an uphill struggle to regain the confidence of bankers and compliance officers, sources told ACAMS moneylaundering.com. The FIU has faced a catalog of issues arising from staff shortages and deficient software since moving from Germany’s federal police unit to the Finance Ministry’s customs branch in June 2017. Those problems resulted in an accumulation of almost 30,000 unprocessed STRs, according to Handelsblatt, leading investigators to label the unit “a significant danger to domestic security” in a report to German lawmakers. A...