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UBS Financial Services fined $125M for Bank Secrecy Act violations
FinCEN said UBS failed to maintain an anti-money laundering program and missed suspicious activity reports, after a prior $14.5 million fine for similar issues.
UBS Financial Services was fined $125 million by U.S. regulators on Aug. 3 for violating the Bank Secrecy Act, which regulators said was the largest civil fine ever against a broker dealer for breaches of the main U.S. anti money laundering law.
According to Insurance Journal, FinCEN said UBS Financial Services admitted it willfully violated the BSA by failing to implement and maintain an anti money laundering program and by failing to file suspicious activity reports.
The settlement also resolves related accusations by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, and it stems from alleged violations that occurred between January 2019 and June 2023.
Regulators cited UBS as a repeat offender, pointing to a prior $14.5 million FinCEN fine in December 2018, and said UBS did not conduct appropriate customer due diligence, including for high risk customers with alleged ties to Russia and Latin America, and did not appropriately monitor more than 60,000 foreign currency wires totaling more than $10 billion.