The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has announced settlements with Webull Financial LLC, Lightspeed Financial Services Group LLC, and Paulson Investment Company, LLC, for failing to include crucial information in suspicious activity reports filed with law enforcement. Meanwhile, internal documents from Morgan Stanley have revealed weak anti-money-laundering (AML) controls and incomplete Know Your Customer (KYC) due-diligence reviews of clients, causing alarm among staff. The documents describe the need for urgent action to address these issues.
At this point it might be easier to come up with a list of banks that *haven’t* fallen afoul of anti money laundering rules or had lax customer due diligence… See WSJ article about Morgan Stanley as the latest example:
These Morgan Stanley $MS documents showing poor KYC/AML controls are deeply unflattering. https://t.co/dH9fEG5hwf
Exclusive: Internal Morgan Stanley documents describe weak anti-money-laundering controls and a failure to complete due-diligence reviews of clients as staff expressed alarm: ‘We need to kill this.’ https://t.co/bPzb0k6OTs https://t.co/bPzb0k6OTs