News

Latvian officials are closely scrutinizing transactions involving foreign payment service providers and e-money institutions with bank accounts in their country amid concerns that such firms have become channels for "laundromats" shut out by Baltic lenders in recent years. Latvia's financial services industry, which for decades has served as a bridge between the former Soviet Union and the EU, has ostensibly undergone a transformation following the proposed U.S.-blacklisting of one its largest banks over money laundering concerns in February 2018 and a damning global assessment of the country's anti-financial crime defenses six months later. Those events spurred Latvian officials to ban...