Compliance & Ethics

Five payment firms in Singapore just learned a costly lesson about weak anti-money laundering controls and why it won’t fly under the radar. The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has issued $710,000 (S$960,000) in composition penalties after uncovering serious compliance failures across five licensed payment institutions. The firms (Remsea, Arcade Plaza Traders, J-Dee Remittance, Mobile Community Tech, and OxPay SG) were found to have fallen short of core safeguards meant to prevent financial crime.

The UK’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) has stepped up its efforts to combat cross-border corruption by officially joining the International Anti-Corruption Coordination Centre (IACCC), an elite global law enforcement alliance housed within the UK’s National Crime Agency.

Meta is back in the hot seat in Brussels, just months after it was slapped with a €200 million fine for breaching the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). This time, the European Commission is warning that Meta could face daily penalty payments if its updated “pay-or-consent” model still fails to meet the bloc’s legal standards.

In a parting shot that sounds more like a call to arms than a quiet policy recommendation, Australia’s competition watchdog has officially closed its five-year deep dive into digital platform services, and without regulatory reform, consumers and small businesses will keep getting steamrolled.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) has imposed a combined $8.5 million in penalties on the Dutch affiliates of Deloitte, PwC, and EY after uncovering widespread cheating on mandatory internal training exams by hundreds of professionals across all three firms.

In a notable shift to its supervisory approach, the Federal Reserve Board announced Monday that reputational risk will no longer be a formal component of its examination programs for banks. The move marks a departure from long-standing practices in regulatory supervision and signals a recalibration of how the Fed evaluates risk within financial institutions.

Velox Clearing, a Miami-based clearing broker with just two-dozen registered representatives, has learned the hard way that a skeleton compliance crew and patchwork surveillance don’t cut it when you’re moving thinly traded penny stocks for foreign clients.