Overview
- FinCEN, which on Monday imposed a $125 million civil money penalty, led a set of parallel actions that included $20 million fines from the SEC and FINRA and an $8 million CFTC penalty for a total of $153 million in nominal penalties.
- Regulators found UBS relied on a quarterly manual FX‑wire report and then on a 2021 automated system that was misconfigured, causing data‑feed and transaction‑labeling problems that left more than 50,000 foreign‑currency wires worth over $10 billion insufficiently monitored or omitted.
- The enforcement treats the failures as willful and repeat conduct tied to a 2018 consent order, with UBS admitting violations of the Bank Secrecy Act and related broker‑dealer and futures rules.
- Under the settlements UBS must hire independent third parties to review its anti‑money‑laundering program and complete a mandated lookback to identify and file reports on missed suspicious transactions, with up to $15 million of FinCEN’s penalty eligible for waiver if the work is finished to regulators’ satisfaction.
- The actions raise ongoing legal and reputational risk for UBS by creating a process that could produce further regulatory or criminal referrals, and regulators said earlier remediation already produced thousands of late suspicious‑activity reports covering roughly $250 million in transactions.