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New Year Ushers in Questions of Compliance Priorities, Say AML Experts
printNew Year's Eve may have come and gone and all of the post-celebration headaches faded, but financial institutions are going to need many more months to recover from 2008. With the dust yet to settle from the financial fallout of the subprime crisis and a political change of the guard underway, bank compliance officers begin 2009 with more questions than answers. Financial institutions that struggled to fulfill the requirements of anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing regulations wonder if those efforts must take a back seat to handling the credit crisis. Compliance officers in particular find themselves besieged, fulfilling their traditional...
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Bank closings and enforcement actions for capital requirement and credit risk violations didn't preclude law enforcement and regulatory officials from pursuing banks for violating U.S. and international sanctions in 2009 or from leaning on financial institutions to catch tax cheats.
Twenty-five banks failed in 2008, including Seattle-based Washington Mutual, the largest bank to fail in U.S. history. With less resources and with regulators focused on credit markets and capital requirements, compliance officers faced a whole new set of regulatory challenges.
Regulators spent less face time addressing AML concerns as the lion's share of regulatory attention was devoted to subprime lending standards and the broader credit crisis. But, when financial regulators and the Justice Department weighed in, they did so heavily, assessing record penalties.
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