This week’s brief leads with the biggest US AML rewrite in roughly 40 years, layered against an escalating run of mid-tier enforcement on three continents, two FinCEN alerts that reset Iran and trafficking typologies, and a Russia sanctions tempo that is now drifting faster between Washington, London, and Brussels than most screening vendors can keep […]
Read More
Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced a string of money laundering charges levied against two Chinese nationals with significant ties to multiple transnational criminal organizations. The indictment of the two men, Ruhuan Zhen and Hongce Wu, became the latest escalation in an increasingly global war over cartel money, a conflict that no […]
Read More
On May 5, 2026, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei officially took the stage in New York to unveil a suite of ten specialized AI financial agent templates, a move that sent shockwaves through the fintech sector. Designed to automate everything from investment pitchbooks to complex compliance workflows, the announcement triggered a flurry of speculative headlines questioning […]
Read More
Four developments this week point in the same direction. The expectations that supervisors have communicated for years through guidance, examination findings, and enforcement actions are being written into statute and treaty law. In Washington, the CLARITY Act cleared the Senate Banking Committee on a 15 to 9 vote, with a floor vote expected after the […]
Read More
HSBC’s exposure to the collapse of UK lender Market Financial Solutions has revealed major fraud and money laundering vulnerabilities within the rapidly expanding private credit industry.
Read More
In the world of high-stakes finance, October 10, 2024, will be remembered as the day the music stopped for TD Bank. It wasn’t just the $3.09 billion in coordinated penalties from the DOJ, FinCEN, and the OCC1. It wasn’t even the fact that they became the largest bank in U.S. history to plead guilty to […]
Read More
Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the results of a major international takedown effort coordinated by financial regulators and law enforcement agencies both domestically and abroad, culminating in the arrests of over 276 bad actors carrying out a long-standing transnational criminal ploy at the expense of countless unsuspecting American citizens. According to […]
Read More
On April 24, 2026, the European Union formally adopted its 20th package of restrictive measures against Russia (Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, 2026). This legislation marks a critical evolution in the bloc’s economic statecraft. While the early days of the conflict saw massive, blunt-force sanctions aimed at severing direct bilateral trade, the landscape has fundamentally […]
Read More
In April 2026, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) significantly escalated its sanctions campaign against Iran by moving to not only designate maritime vessels and facilitators tied to their illicit oil trade, but by also directly targeting the commercial infrastructure sustaining that trade as part of a greater movement coined […]
Read More
The current state of U.S. – Iran relations continue to be defined by a simultaneous series of escalations and follow-up negotiations. The primary issues at hand revolve around a dynamic sanctions campaign targeting Iran’s economic lifelines, continued maritime tension in and around the Strait of Hormuz impacting global trade, and ongoing though fragile, diplomatic efforts […]
Read More