Frankfurt The financial regulator Bafin is demanding further improvements from Deutsche Bank to prevent money laundering and terrorist financing. She had “ordered specific measures” that the bank had to take “and threatened fines in the event of non-compliance,” said the supervisory authority on Friday evening. It is about the implementation of Bafin orders from 2018 and 2019.
The bank confirmed the regulatory action. It is about eliminating deficits that have already been identified in the past within the already agreed deadlines. “No additional deficits are identified in the order. We have agreed with BaFin on the necessary measures and have already implemented a large part of them,” said the financial institution. “We will continue to dedicate the necessary resources and ensure appropriate prioritization in bank governance to continuously improve our control environment and meet the expectations of regulators.”
According to Handelsblatt information, the orders mentioned by Bafin are about problems that the bank had with customer identification in the corporate and investment bank at the time. At that time, the supervisory authority obliged the bank to check the information in the files of tens of thousands of corporate customers and to introduce reliable control processes for this in the future. The bank was given a period of several years in which to work through the problems, staggered according to risk.
The threat of fines that has now been published suggests that over the course of this year supervisors began to have concerns as to whether the bank could really keep to the specified schedule. The decision published on Friday dates from the end of September. The authority had appointed a special representative at the institute in 2018 because of the deficiencies in the fight against money laundering.
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The mandate of this special watchdog was even supplemented and extended again in 2021. Even then, the Bafin warned, among other things, “further appropriate internal security measures” and due diligence requirements “especially with regard to the standard process for customer updates”. The Bafin rebukes were followed at regular intervals by personnel changes at Deutsche Bank: Stefan Wilken, who was appointed head of money laundering prevention in 2018, was followed in 2021 by the American Joe Salama.
More: Deutsche Bank has to screen 20,000 high-risk customers