Kathryn Westmore

With the news of yet another bank under investigation by the Financial Conduct Authority for potential breaches of anti-money laundering regulations, what are banks getting wrong? And what is the FCA doing about it? Read Kathryn Westmore's piece for Law360.

Kathryn Westmore from the Royal United Services Institute, a defence and security think tank, said: “This is exactly the kind of case where a delay in payments might be helpful. When you’re stressed, trying to multitask or worried about something, it can become very difficult to see the wood from the trees. I think Wise should have been aware that there was something wrong with these transactions. The flow of funds is just too unusual for them not to be picked up by any decent transaction monitoring system.”

Kathryn Westmore of the Royal United Services Institute warned of the "steadily increasing" losses to fraud. She said: “Leaving aside tax fraud and benefit fraud, the MoD is by far and away the Government department that suffers the biggest fraud losses and the statistics show that this has been steadily increasing over the last 10 years. A vast amount of money is lost to procurement fraud in the MoD; in 2021 the Public Accounts Committee said that the MoD’s procurement process was ‘broken’ and it doesn’t seem to have improved much. “That said, there has been a large focus in the public sector on detecting fraud with departments encouraged to actively look for and report fraud. The value of fraud losses and the length of time it takes to complete an investigation are still staggering though.”