Financial Services

Where Firms Should Concentrate Compliance Efforts In the past few months, both the SEC and FINRA issued guidance concerning their regulatory priorities for the coming year. Both of the agency’s annual priorities letters address a large number of diverse topics. Experts from Baker Donelson discuss where the SEC's and FINRA's concerns overlap, what they have indicated their areas of focus and...

Each year, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) shares its regulatory and examination priorities for the coming year, highlighting both new and continuing areas of focus. In this post, experts from Venable LLP provide an overview of the most significant areas addressed in the 2018 letter. With co-authors D. E. (Ed) Wilson Jr., Andrew E. Bigart and Charles B. Alvis...

Why "Minimal Viable Compliance" Can’t Be the Goal Major regulatory deadlines often lead firms to settle for minimum viable compliance – taking whatever action is needed to avoid regulatory scrutiny, regardless of the cost. But this approach inevitably leads to an inefficient, patchwork approach to compliance, where new procedures are created for each new regulation. As firms move past the...

Key Concerns for Private Funds in 2018 with co-authors Joshua M. Newville, Michael R. Hackett, Anthony Drenzek, William Dalsen, Alexandra V. Bargoot, Brian Hooven and Lucy Wolf With the public equity markets at an all-time high and private equity fundraising setting new records, it might seem counterintuitive to forecast litigation and regulatory risks. The opposite is true. Disputes typically follow capital, and the steeper the growth curve, the...

QDD (or Qualified Derivatives Dealers) is the latest set of requirements for broker-dealers and banks to apply for if they’d like to avoid the barrage of withholding taxes that have been set forth by the IRS – including the hotly debated 871(m), which sets a transaction tax on equity-linked derivatives with underlying assets as American instruments. And while QDD may...

What Money Laundering Looks Like in Community Banks Although they generally have smaller compliance teams and budgets, the nation’s community banks face the same arduous compliance challenges as their larger bank counterparts. Artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions can greatly assist community banks by detecting suspicious entities and transactions in an effort to improve regulatory compliance and AML investigation efficiency....

A Much-Needed Intelligent Approach to Segmentation Anti-money laundering (AML) is a complex and persistent challenge for financial institutions. AI is transforming key elements of the AML workflow and delivering an order of magnitude in performance improvements in the process. Money laundering has become the leading source of compliance fines for North American and European institutions. In 2016 alone, regulators levied...

Are Banks Bracing for Tougher Compliance? Every new AML regulation – or update – is meant to prompt banks and financial institutions to improve their compliance efforts. The latest announcement by the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYS DFS), enacting Part 504, is another such regulatory measure. Initially the impact will be felt only in New York, but...

Companies engaged in cross-border commerce are uncertain about how the use of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies may heighten the risk of noncompliance with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and other anti-fraud and corruption regulations. Consider what risks may arise and what controls might be needed to keep an aspiring but misguided employee from successfully executing a payoff without being...

The SEC’s new and proposed rules allow companies to update and simplify their disclosure requirements as part of the SEC’s overall disclosure effectiveness review. This modernization of the SEC disclosure system discussed in the SEC’s Regulation S-K concept release in 2016 is designed to eliminate redundant, overlapping and outdated requirements and align them with current accounting principles and improvement in...

Many public companies are in the process of preparing their annual 10-K reports for the SEC, and for these firms, it’s critical that management have a full understanding of the disclosure requirements. Ron Kral addresses several of the key challenges and questions organizations may have in conducting an effective ICFR evaluation.

In the wake of the Wells Fargo scandal related to the creation of millions of unauthorized accounts, government records revealed that former employees-turned-whistleblowers contacted the federal agency tasked with investigating whistleblower complaints as early as 2009, once again raising questions of how federal agencies can better protect whistleblowers.