Regulators Tell USAA: Do Better, Faster

USAA

Head’s up, compliance and IT executives in the banking sector! We have another bank sanctioned by regulators for taking too long to get its regulatory compliance act together. This time it’s USAA taken to the woodshed, for failing to implement reforms promised in previous consent orders from 2019 and 2022. The Office of the Comptroller…

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TD Bank: Remediation and Accountability

TD

Today let’s return to the compliance debacle at TD Bank. By now you probably know the bank pleaded guilty to running a terrible anti-money laundering compliance program and must pay $3 billion in penalties for its misconduct. Let’s move on to the next question: how will regulators assure that TD Bank improves its compliance program? …

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TD Bank: The Strategic Errors

TD

Today we begin a series on the compliance failures at TD Bank, which pleaded guilty last week to charges that its anti-money laundering compliance program totally sucked. The failures here are so astonishing and the lessons so important, a single post can’t do the story justice.  Let’s start with a recap of the misconduct itself,…

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Feds Hammer TD on AML Failures

TD

The corporate compliance community has a new case-study in program failures courtesy of TD Bank, which will pay more than $3 billion to settle charges that its anti-money laundering compliance program had been a mess for years; and must also live under restrictions on future growth until it completes an overhaul of its AML compliance…

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Wells Fargo, Part II: The Data Stuff

data

Today we continue our look at the latest enforcement action against Wells Fargo, this time examining all the operational-level improvements that the bank needs to make in its financial crimes compliance program, per a settlement with banking regulators reached last week. As you might recall, Wells reached a settlement with the Office of the Comptroller…

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Citi Gets $136M Butt-Kick

citigroup

The compliance drama-rama at Citigroup continues! Regulators just imposed another $136 million in new monetary penalties for the bank’s failure to complete compliance and risk management improvements required by a previous consent order from 2020, which had imposed a $400 million penalty of its own. So that’s more than half a billion dollars Citigroup is…

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Fifth Third Bank Settles Bogus Accounts Mess

Fifth Third

Fifth Third Bank has agreed to pay a $20 million fine and to overhaul its employee performance management practices, to settle a long-running lawsuit that workers were opening fake accounts without customer permission to meet sales goals and that they were saddling auto-loan borrowers with insurance the borrowers didn’t need. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,…

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Scorching Report on FDIC’s Flawed Culture

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., one of the primary banking regulators in the United States, has released a blistering report about the agency’s own failure to uphold a culture of compliance, workplace respect, and accountability. Ethics and compliance professionals have so much to digest here we’ll need to explore it all over the course of…

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How ‘Fairness’ Helps Compliance

ethical dilemmas

Compliance officers struggle mightily to articulate the right balance between what’s ethical and what’s legal. So when one of the country’s top banking regulators gave a speech earlier this week titled “Fairness and effective compliance management,” it caught my eye. The regulator in question is Michael Hsu, acting head of the Office of the Comptroller…

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City National, Part II: Customer Due Diligence

City National

Today let’s return to that enforcement action against City National Bank, issued by federal banking regulators last week for City National’s systemic risk management shortcomings. We originally looked at the settlement order’s advice on risk assessments; next up is another common compliance challenge: customer due diligence. The recap here is that the Office of the…

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