MVA White Collar Defense, Investigations, and Regulatory Advice Blog

Anti-Money Laundering and Know Your Customer departments at financial institutions are on the front lines of human trafficking.  Not only does enhanced transaction monitoring help law enforcement identify trafficking circumstances through generation of Suspicious Activity Reports but it helps avoid high risk lending relationships and cuts the power source of businesses or people who facilitate trafficking.

Recently, there has been an emergence of legal action related to organizational responsibility for human trafficking.  In November, the Australian Transaction ...

On November 6, 2019, the Fraud Section of the Department of Justice with the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas, and the CFTC, announced settlements of their spoofing and market manipulation investigations of Tower Research Capital LLC (Tower Research).  The penalties are the highest in a spoofing case to date. The Department’s settlement again indicates that the Fraud Section has concluded spoofing and market manipulation are widespread, so general deterrence requires harsher sanction. However, there is also important history.  The predicted ...

Charlotte Financial Regulatory Advice & Response Co-Head Neil Bloomfield served as a panelist for Mecklenburg County Bar’s 19^th Annual Banking and Finance Forum which took place on November 22. Bloomfield joined others from Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Bryan Cave to discuss “LIBOR Transition Challenges.”  During the panel, Mr. Bloomfield discussed the latest regulatory guidance and best practices in managing the transition away from LIBOR to SOFR.  

MVA is proud to once again be a sponsoring partner for The Clearing House + Bank Policy Institute Annual Conference, which took take place in New York on November 19–21. Now in its ninth year, The Clearing House + Bank Policy Institute Annual Conference is the leading conference for key regulatory, legal, and payments issues facing America’s largest commercial banks. Held for two and a half days at The Pierre Hotel in New York, the TCH + BPI Annual Conference brings together the industry’s leading executives and thought leaders – C-suite financial services executives ...

On September 16, 2019, the Department of Justice and the CFTC jointly announced the indictment of three precious metal traders for an alleged eight year conspiracy to manipulate gold, silver, platinum, and palladium futures prices and civil charges based upon the same conduct. (One former trader from the institution had already pleaded guilty to one count of commodities fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, commodities fraud, price manipulation, and spoofing; a second former trader had pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to engage in spoofing and one count of ...

By Neil Bloomfield and Kristina Whittaker. Operational risk is a continuing and increasing focus of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and, as a result, it needs to be a greater priority of the institutions it regulates. The OCC publishes a "Semiannual Risk Perspective" that addresses key issues facing banks and other federally chartered institutions.

In recent years, the OCC has categorized operational risks as elevated as banks respond to an evolving and increasingly complex environment. The OCC defines operational risk as the risk to current or projected financial ...

By Neil Bloomfield. In another sign of progress, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) proposed easing a rule that requires banks to put cash aside to safeguard derivatives trades among affiliates. The proposal would remove the current requirement for members within the same bank group to post margins upfront when trading derivatives.  According to a 2018 survey conducted by the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA), the new rule could free up to $40 billion across some of the largest banks. FDIC Chairman Jelena McWilliams also stated that revoking the ...

By Neil Bloomfield. The Task Force on Consumer Compliance of the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) recently published the modified interagency examination procedures for the Flood Disaster Protection Act (FDPA) designed to promote consistency and communication of supervisory expectations in the examination process. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Farm Credit Administration, and the National Credit Union Administration issued ...

By Neil Bloomfield. The Federal Reserve Board (Federal Reserve) recently announced it will develop a “new round-the-clock real-time payment and settlement service”, named the FedNow℠Service to support faster payments in the United States.  FedNow will be a national instant payment system that is designed to offer an option for consumers and businesses to transfer up to $25,000 24x7x365. Federal Reserve Board Governor Lael Brainard stated, “FedNow will permit banks of every size in every community across the country to provide real-time payments to their customers.”

By Barbara Meeks and Kristina Whittaker. Last month the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and the federal bank regulators issued a Joint Statement aimed at improving transparency into their risk-focused examination and supervision of banks’ compliance with Bank Secrecy Act/Anti-money Laundering (BSA/AML) requirements. 

The statement outlines common supervisory practices for assessing a bank’s BSA/AML risk profile, scope and planning of examinations and evaluating the adequacy of BSA/AML compliance programs.  The risk-focused approach enables federal ...