The financial services industry and the enforcement agencies that regulate it are in a collective state of panic right now, as they should be, after thousands of suspicious activity reports (SARs) filed by the world’s largest banks were leaked to the media.
While the disclosure of SARs themselves constitutes a criminal offense, there’s nothing earth-shattering about systemic failures in anti-money laundering (AML) compliance. What is noble about the efforts of the consortium of journalists that have been painstakingly sifting through these SARs, however, is that it brings banks’ shady activities out of the shadows in a way and to a degree that they’ve never been exposed before.
