Deutsche Bank has reportedly found ‘serious failings’ within its payments screening and AML procedures.
The bank, which has been embroiled in a handful of compliance issues, has uncovered failures within AML and sanctions controls which have allowed cheques and high-value digital payments to be processed without suitable checks, a report from the Financial Times claims.
These faults lasted a year and were identified by internal auditors, the article said.
A total of six insufficiencies were founded, of which, one was a filtering gap involving cheques written by foreign corporate clients to foreign players, according to the article citing people familiar with the process. While these problems were initially found six months ago, the London office is still trying to resolve them.
The bank still processes around 50,000 cheques a year through its UK and Ireland unit, and it has not been able to identify how many years this issue has been present or how many cheques were affected. It does believe the impact was relatively low as only cheques written by three corporate clients were involved, it said.
These banks involved were not named but are ‘publicly listed blue-chips in developed countries’ and not a high-risk customer.
This is not the first time this year Deutsche Bank has found itself under fire for failures. Earlier in the year, the bank was subject to review due to a claim it had not informed federal financial crime watchdogs on suspicious transactions involving Donald Trump.
Earlier in the year, Germany’s financial regulatory authority BaFin extended its mandate on Deutsche Bank. Originally, the mandate was deployed to prevent money laundering and terrorist financing by requiring the bank to review its group-wide risk management processes.
This action was taken due to its involvement within the $200bn Danske Bank money laundering scandal. Deutsche Bank has reportedly served as a correspondent bank and helped transfer funds.
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