Anti-money laundering compliance consultant Frank Ewing remembers working with a bank that had rolled out a new product to allow its customers to send money back and forth to their families living in Mexico, Colombia and other countries. The bank issued two debit cards, both in the customer's name, and allowed for one to be shipped to, say, Mexico, recalled Ewing. The product had been available for almost eight months when Ewing's firm, AMLRightSource in Cleveland, was brought on as a consultant. The bank, which operated in a high intensity drug trafficking area, hadn't yet considered the AML risks of...
The push by community banks and other financial institutions to generate fee income with new products is causing some institutions to run afoul of their examiners, according to federal banking regulators.