As the regulatory landscape for financial services continues to evolve, investment companies are finding themselves at a crossroads.

Amid escalating global tensions and geopolitical uncertainties, numerous bills are being researched and proposed to minimize the impact to United States financial markets.

For over four decades, the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) rate has influenced various parts of the finance industry, used as the key point of reference for financial instruments, such as future contracts, the U.S. dollar, interest rate swaps, and variable rate mortgages.

As the 2023 fiscal year gets off to a running start, asset management firms face increasingly acute ramifications of risky data management practices. News sources continue to pump out weekly articles headlining immense fines and reputation hits due to compliance issues within some of the most well-known firms.

Investing in Your Compliance Culture

For nearly four years between April 2017 and October 2021, Wells Fargo Advisors went unnoticed in a financially threatening scandal involving its failure to file 34 suspicious activity reports. Risky wire transfers facilitating "money laundering, terrorist financing, and other illegal money transactions to and from foreign countries"1 were swept under the rug due to the faulty implementation of Wells Fargo's 2019 update to its internal anti-money laundering, or AML, monitoring and alert system.

In 2014, the United States’ regulatory hammer came down on BNP Paribas SA, sending a shock to compliance systems across the globe. Pleading guilty to violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the Trading with the Enemy Act, the French bank would rack up a $9 billion price tag.[1] The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) would go on to make an example of those who violate sanction laws and risk national security interests, reaching the largest sanctions-related settlement of $963 million.[2]