Supervision

Dutch financial group ING is bracing for a criminal indictment in Luxembourg over its failure to properly manage anti-money laundering (AML) processes at its unit in the Grand Duchy.

The bank said it was informed in January by a Luxembourg investigating judge that he intends to instruct the relevant prosecutor to prepare a criminal indictment regarding shortcomings in the anti-money laundering at ING Luxembourg.

Rather than having to file the same publicly available financial and non-financial information multiple times with national and European regulators, why not have a single, centralised repository for this data? That’s the idea behind the European Single Access Point (ESAP) which has just been given the go-ahead. ESMA is now working on the devilish detail, with a view to launch at the start of 2025.

Top-level European securities markets regulator ESMA (European Securities and Markets Authority) has announced it will be examining the valuation of UCITS and open-ended alternative investment funds (AIFs) across the EU.

Integrating distributed ledger technology (DLT) can be “a real challenge” for financial institutions and regulators, Luxembourg’s financial regulator the CSSF (Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier) said last Friday in a white paper on distributed ledger technology (DLT), also known as blockchain (a type of DLT, the CSSF noted). 

Luxembourg has decided to raise charges for supervising financial institutions by approximately 10 to 15 percent this year, according to an analysis of the Grand Duchy’s recent government decision. The increase was roughly 15 percent for banks, while investment firms were informed of increases of around 10 percent for 2022.

In the medium term, the green transition may further fuel inflationary risks, according to ECB board member Isabel Schnabel in an interview with the Financial Times last weekend. Rising energy prices, she said, may require the ECB to do more to hold back increases. She urged portfolios to increase their investments into real assets. 

International financial regulators, considering lessons learned from defusing systemic risks in the banking sector, have set their sights on similar risk tools to reduce the systemic risks associated with open-ended bond funds. An industry representative claims that such macroprudential tools won’t work as regulators don’t fully understand how fund management works. The markets, meanwhile, have little faith that regulators can effectively resolve this daunting conundrum.