GRC Report Staff

When AWS falters, the internet trembles. That’s what millions experienced early Monday as websites and apps across the world slowed, stalled, or disappeared altogether after Amazon Web Services’ Northern Virginia data center went down. The disruption began just after midnight Pacific time, triggered by what AWS later described as a failure in “an internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers.”

The UK’s financial watchdog has warned that many corporate finance firms may be falling short of anti-money laundering rules, following a new survey that revealed widespread weaknesses in financial crime controls across the sector.

The Financial Reporting Council (FRC) has published a new report setting out what’s working, and what isn’t, across the audits of the UK’s twelve largest firms. Drawing from inspections carried out over the 2023/24 and 2024/25 cycles, the regulator’s Key Findings and Good Practice Report shines a light on both the progress being made and the persistent gaps that continue to shape the state of audit quality in the UK.

The Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM) and De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) are warning that the Netherlands’ financial system is becoming increasingly fragile, not because of balance sheets or liquidity, but because of its digital backbone.

The Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) has reprimanded and fined UBS $1 million (HK$8 million) after uncovering a 12-year stretch of compliance failures tied to the bank’s misclassification of professional investors in Hong Kong. The regulator cited “deficiencies in internal systems and controls” that led to the inaccurate classification of hundreds of client accounts and improper access to restricted financial products.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) has published its 2024 Report on Supervisory Convergence, signaling a quiet but meaningful shift in how the EU oversees its banking sector. After more than a decade of building the Single Rulebook, the focus is no longer on writing rules, it’s on making sure they work.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Federal Reserve Board (FRB), and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) have jointly withdrawn their Principles for Climate-Related Financial Risk Management for Large Financial Institutions, rescinding guidance that had been in place since October 2023 in a major policy reversal.