Compliance & Ethics

For 208 business days, Deutsche Bank’s reports to Australia’s corporate regulator placed hundreds of thousands of derivatives transactions on the wrong side of the ledger. The problem was in the “direction” fields, mandatory entries showing whether the bank was acting as the effective buyer or seller at a specified price. Deutsche Bank reported those fields inaccurately for 264,574 over-the-counter derivatives transactions between Oct. 21, 2024, and Aug. 15, 2025, according to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.

RentGrow will pay $2.25 million to settle federal allegations that its tenant screening reports included duplicate criminal and eviction records, potentially making some applicants appear to have more extensive histories than they did, the Federal Trade Commission announced Wednesday.

The French Autorité des Marchés Financiers' latest review of anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing controls, published as part of the regulator's 2026 supervisory priorities and its broader Impact 2027 strategy, distills what inspectors found across 46 examinations that resulted in regulatory follow-up between January 1, 2022, and December 31, 2025. Those inspections produced 16 sanction decisions, 16 administrative settlement agreements, and 16 follow-up letters requiring firms to remedy deficiencies, with some inspections leading to more than one form of regulatory action.

Britain's communications regulator has fined Virgin Media £28 million after finding the company repeatedly subjected customers to unreasonable effort and unnecessary difficulty when they tried to cancel their contracts and switch to another provider. The penalty, announced Wednesday, is the largest Ofcom has ever imposed under its consumer protection rules for direct harm to consumers.

In interim measures published Wednesday, the Autorité de la concurrence ordered the Meta to resume talks with two organizations representing French press agencies and publishers after concluding that Meta's conduct may amount to an abuse of a dominant position. The regulator also directed the company to provide, within 15 days, the information that publishers say they need to judge whether Meta's payment offers bear any relationship to the value of the journalism appearing on its services.

On Wednesday, AMLA published draft regulatory technical standards that would establish, for the first time, a common methodology for supervisors across the European Union when enforcing breaches of anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing rules. The proposal is less about creating tougher enforcement than creating more consistent enforcement. If two organizations commit the same breach under the same circumstances, supervisors should begin from the same framework and, absent meaningful differences in the facts, arrive at comparable outcomes.

For nearly three years, Australians arriving at JustAnswer's website were greeted with what looked like a straightforward proposition. An automated chat promised access to expert advice for $1.30 (AUD $2), a small, refundable payment that suggested a single transaction rather than the beginning of an ongoing relationship. It was only later, often after money had already left their accounts, that many consumers discovered they had signed up for recurring monthly subscriptions costing between $29 and $49 (AUD $45 and AUD $75).