When imagining how dirty money is moved around the country, "think of FedEx," says Joseph Burke, chief of the National Bulk Cash Smuggling Center in Vermont. The center is tasked with tracing the sometimes elaborate path of drug proceeds from point-of-sale to the bank teller's window.
A number of large U.S. and international banks are dropping customer accounts and services tied to high-risk geographical regions and lines of business in response to regulatory pressure, including enforcement actions.
The Federal Reserve Thursday ordered Germany's second largest bank to police its correspondent accounts and improve its customer risk assessments' the second such enforcement action in little more than a year.
Prompted by financial regulators, some of the largest U.S. banks have been reevaluating how they gauge geographic financial crime risks in designated high-risk regions of the country, say sources.
A London-based nonprofit group is calling for investigations of at least five financial institutions over their correspondent links to a Central Asian bank at the center of a money laundering probe.
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