Financial Regulatory Forum

By Stuart Gittleman, Compliance Complete

(Additional reporting by Suzanne Barlyn of Reuters)

NEW YORK, Jan. 17 (Thomson Reuters Accelus) - Anti-money laundering compliance will again be a focus of Financial Industry Regulatory Authority examinations this year, particularly at broker-dealers with higher-risk business models due to their clients, products and service mix, or locations.

HSBC’s $1.9 billion fine last month highlighted, among other things, the potential AML risks associated with foreign affiliates and the business they transact through their U.S. financial institution affiliates, FINRA said in its 2013 annual regulatory and examination priorities letter.  (more…)

By Marianne Brown, Thomson Reuters Accelus contributor

LONDON, Dec. 19 (Thomson Reuters Accelus) – Earlier this year, the European Commission published its proposals for the regulation of central securities depositories (CSDs), the entities that operate settlement systems. The proposals, known as the Central Securities Depositories Regulation (CSDR), seek to improve settlement efficiency across European markets, and are currently working their way through the European Parliament and Council. (more…)

By Brett Wolf

ST. LOUIS/NEW YORK, (Thomson Reuters Accelus) - Anti-money laundering officers and a top official with a federal banking regulator on Monday called on the U.S. Treasury and Justice departments to clarify for banks whether they can provide services to marijuana businesses.

These calls to action, which were offered during a discussion panel at an anti-money laundering conference in the U.S. capital were prompted by the ballot measures that last week made Colorado and Washington state the first states to permit recreational marijuana sale and use.  (more…)

By Rachel Wolcott

LONDON/NEW YORK, July 30 (Thomson Reuters Accelus) - Risk managers could benefit from the financial services industry’s revamp of collateral management services in preparation for the new regulatory requirements that will drive demand for high-quality collateral. New regulations for the clearing of over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives through central counterparties (CCPs) alone could increase demand for high-quality collateral to $2 trillion or more, according to some estimates. In response, some firms are aiming for a more universal approach to collateral management.

Many firms still take a rather old-fashioned view of collateral management. It is often fragmented and inefficient. Most firms operate collateral management in silos determined by geography or asset class. This can lead to poor communication between different collateral management functions — for example, repo staff might not speak to the securities lending unit, or the New York office might not speak to its UK counterpart as much or as often as it should.  (more…)

By Rachel Wolcott

LONDON, June 14 (Thomson Reuters Accelus) - It may seem like a subtle difference, but most of what banks call ‘risk management’ is often more akin to ‘risk measurement’. It is a myth that banks are in possession of fancy gadgetry that allows them to measure risk on a minute-by-minute basis from a specialised risk-control tower and react to it effectively, thus averting catastrophe. Instead, the financial crisis and trading losses, such as JPMorgan’s $2 billion blow-up in May, have shown that by the time banks measure and understand their risks, it is too late. Risk management is not about controlling risk, but about offsetting its impact after the fact.

Far from being a powerful high-tech unit within a firm that is charged with hedging risks on a macro basis — the way, for example, that JPMorgan’s chief investment office has been portrayed — risk management is more fragmented and limited. That is why many banks were badly hit when Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008. It was just too difficult to get a picture of what their positions, exposures and risks were, let alone manage them. This is because, in many cases, banks’ risk management still has more to do with number crunching and measuring risk for compliance and regulatory purposes, such as regulatory capital requirements, credit value adjustment and counterparty risk. Managing risk, however, is something few firms do well, and they are certainly unable to do so in a holistic way. (more…)

By Rachel Wolcott

LONDON/NEW YORK, May 16 (Thomson Reuters Accelus) – Talk to any compliance officer these days and the chances are they will tell a story about too many new rules from too many jurisdictions that are too complicated and labour-intensive and expensive to implement. Each time another missive hits their desks from the Financial Services Authority (FSA), or one of the many other global, European Union or U.S. regulators, bankers, their compliance officers or risk managers, wonder quite how they will be able to manage the implementation process and also, perhaps more importantly how much it will all cost.

At the Cass-Capco Institute Paper Series on Risk conference held last month in London, a senior compliance official from a global systemically important financial (G-SIFI) institution said: “We are deluged with regulations that we don’t know will work, then we have to implement them. People are getting lost in a mire of complexity.”  (more…)

By Emmanuel Olaoye, Julie DiMauro and Randall Mikkelsen

NEW YORK, May 15 (Thomson Reuters Accelus) - Corporate executives and boards face big challenges monitoring risk at complex banks like JPMorgan Chase & Co, which was warned by an investor group last year that its board had “serious deficiencies” and was not up to the task.

Challenges to connecting the dots to form a clear risk picture at sprawling global institution with multiple business units like JPMorgan include difficulties tracking data, differing regulatory jurisdictions, and crucially, inadequate corporate governance. (more…)

By Rachel Wolcott

LONDON/NEW YORK, May 15 (Thomson Reuters Accelus) – JPMorgan’s Chief Investment Office, which last week was responsible for more than $2 billion in mark-to-market losses, appears to have made some classic mistakes in the risk management of trading desks and the monitoring of traders. Although the CIO losses have not been blamed on a rogue trader, they do have much in common with the incidents at UBS and Société Générale, where single traders lost billions seemingly overnight.  (more…)

By Rachel Wolcott

NEW YORK, May 14 (Thomson Reuters Accelus) - JPMorgan Chase & Co’s revelation that it had trading losses of at least $2 billion on a failed hedging strategy may have tipped the hand to one way Wall Street executives plan to get around the Volcker Rule.

The incident shows how firms could use the pending rule’s hedging exemption to do proprietary trades and still technically be compliant with Volcker. It could allow firms to keep some proprietary trading desks, but portray them to regulators as something else, such as portfolio hedging. (more…)

By Stuart Gittleman

NEW YORK, May 8 (Thomson Reuters Accelus) - Many of the world’s top private equity funds will soon be examined by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Carlo di Florio, director of OCIE, the SEC’s Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations, said.

Fourteen of the 50 largest hedge fund advisers in the world, and 18 of the 50 largest private equity funds in the world, are newly registered with the SEC under the Dodd-Frank Act, di Florio said at a private fund compliance conference in Manhattan last week.  (more…)