Compliance & Ethics

Sweden's annual anti-money laundering reporting exercise has long been a familiar ritual. Each year, supervised firms answer the same set of questions, submit them to the Financial Supervisory Authority (FI), and move on. That routine is about to change. Beginning on 1 January 2027, the regulator will replace the existing reporting framework with an entirely new questionnaire that asks firms not simply what they do, but what kinds of risks they carry and how well their controls are built to contain them.

Australia's communications regulator has chosen its battles for the coming year, and the list says as much about where consumer harm is emerging as it does about where regulators believe industry performance still falls short. The Australian Communications and Media Authority's compliance and enforcement priorities for 2026–27 place emergency communications, telecommunications scams, consumer protections, and mobile device compliance at the center of its agenda.

Three times, CACEIS UK checked the Financial Services Register. Three times, it was presented with information showing that WealthTek lacked permission to hold certain client assets. Nothing happened that altered the course of the relationship. According to an enforcement action the UK's Financial Conduct Authority published Thursday, concluding that the asset servicing bank failed to respond appropriately to repeated warning signs while acting as WealthTek's sub-custodian.

A clock counting down to the end of a sale carries an implicit promise—buy now or the opportunity disappears. The Italian Competition Authority says Deghi made that promise over and over again without ever intending to keep it. The regulator has fined the Italian home furnishings and e-commerce retailer €2.0 million ($2.3 million) after concluding that the company systematically misled consumers by presenting discounts as fleeting when they were anything but.

The Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates has imposed a financial penalty of approximately $5.4 million (AED 20 million) on a branch of a foreign bank after examinations identified significant and repeated deficiencies in its anti-money laundering, counter-terrorism financing, sanctions, and illegal organizations compliance framework.

The Securities and Exchange Commission spent the past several weeks figuring out how to return money to investors. The agency advanced distribution efforts in three separate enforcement matters involving United Parcel Service, American Electric Power, and Andeavor, together representing $84 million in civil penalties that the SEC intends to distribute through Fair Funds established under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

More than 51,000 ticket buyers will receive refunds after Britain's competition watchdog concluded that StubHub UK illegally withheld mandatory fees until the final stage of the checkout process, a practice regulators have spent the past year trying to stamp out across online commerce.