Compliance

A Look at SEC, FINRA and Other Issues Cryptocurrency experienced massive and unprecedented growth in 2017, rising from a total market cap of $18.8 billion in January 2017 to $598.5 billion in December 2017. As of February 6, 2018, there were over 1,500 virtual currencies. The emergence of cryptocurrency has caused concern for regulators, who see rampant growth and speculation...

Getting the Full Picture, Fast Comprehensively identifying and verifying corporate hierarchies and ultimate beneficial owners (UBOs) has become increasingly important since the implementation of 4MLD and MLR2017. However, achieving this view is time-consuming, and most organisations struggle to uncover the full picture. In this article, Paul Charmatz, Managing Director at encompass corporation, explores some of the big questions around beneficial ownership....

Jeff Clark of Willkie Farr & Gallagher provides comprehensive guidance for planning and executing internal investigations and leveraging resources.  

The Risk to Investors Despite the proliferation of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, financial regulators have been slow to introduce rules to govern them. Cordium’s Jesse Brown surveys the current state of regulation regarding investment in cryptocurrencies and ICOs and discusses the compliance considerations investors should make before pursuing investments in the crypto space. Cryptocurrency and its applications within the financial...

A Compliance Challenge On April 6, the U.S. imposed economic sanctions on a number of Russian individuals and entities (specially designated nationals, or SDNs). Wendy Wysong, Nick Turner and Ali Burney offer insights into how these sanctions will impact U.S. and non-U.S. persons and businesses. with co-authors Nick Turner and Ali Burney The most recent U.S. economic sanctions on Russia...

5 Actions to Take Now With the New York State Department of Financial Services (“DFS”) Part 504 regulation’s first annual compliance certification deadline approaching, financial institutions must ensure compliance as soon as possible. This piece discusses practical steps to benchmark your program against the requirements. The International Monetary Fund estimates money laundering makes up between 2 and 5 percent of...

A Primer on the Standardized Approach to Credit Risk The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) regulatory body has proposed using a standardized approach to credit risk (SA-CR) when measuring credit risk. Banks using intelligent process automation (IPA) may leverage the approach to ensure compliance with the new due diligence requirements. Most of the recent regulatory changes or guidelines being issued...

The Potential Changes Coming There’s still a significant amount of uncertainty around blockchain, but the technology is already proving transformational, and its use in the GRC field may just revolutionize the compliance and audit professions. Christian Auty offers several predictions about the impact blockchain will have on compliance. The bloom is off the rose. The uncertainty – regulatory and otherwise...

Implications for Compliance Programs from the Digital Realty Ruling The Supreme Court ruled recently on the Digital Realty v. Somers case, and the decision is significant from a compliance standpoint; potential informants are incentivized to report directly to the SEC rather than through internal channels. Peter Rasmussen of Bloomberg Law offers key tips for corporate counsel to minimize any risks...

Embracing New Technologies Fenergo’s Laura Glynn discusses how banks around the world are embracing a more digitalized and transformative approach to compliance and, indeed, client life cycle management. Read Part 1. The global financial services industry is currently on the brink of a massive technological disruption. Financial institutions are now beginning to actively explore new technologies, such as artificial intelligence...

Little Movement in Latest Transparency International Rankings Transparency International published its 2017 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) on February 21, 2018, showing modest improvements for most countries in Asia-Pacific. Some higher-risk countries, however, continue their downward slide in the overall rankings. We've included the Asia Pacific countries below and the full CPI is available at https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_perceptions_index_2017. with co-author Nicholas Turner The...

Making Sense of Dollars and Cents With the upcoming GDPR directive on everyone’s minds, compliance is a hot issue. Many see compliance as an unnecessary additional expenditure. What they fail to realize, however, is that noncompliance costs nearly three times as much as compliance does. Today, data is more valuable than gold, and organizations are hyperaware of how precious this...