Compliance & Ethics

There is a moment in almost every regulatory framework when compliance ceases to be the interesting question. The forms have been completed and the governance structures exist. Policies have been approved, committees have met, and someone can demonstrate that every required process was followed. Yet consumers can still end up with products that were never truly designed for them. Regulation, at its most useful, begins where documentation stops.

Australia's anti-money laundering regime became considerably larger , when tens of thousands of businesses will enter the scope of the country's anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing laws, extending compliance obligations well beyond the financial sector into industries long regarded by investigators as attractive channels for laundering illicit funds.

Belgium's Financial Services and Markets Authority has reached a €1 million agreed settlement with Banque Degroof Petercam after concluding that the bank breached European conduct rules while administering employee stock-option plans. The regulator found shortcomings in the disclosure of costs, the management of conflicts of interest and the assessment of whether certain investment products were appropriate for employees.

Australia's corporate regulator has secured a $6.7 million (AUD $10.3 million) penalty against Mercer Super after the Federal Court found the superannuation trustee maintained inadequate systems for identifying and reporting significant compliance investigations, allowing serious member service issues to go undisclosed or be reported inaccurately over nearly three years.

Sweden's annual anti-money laundering reporting exercise has long been a familiar ritual. Each year, supervised firms answer the same set of questions, submit them to the Financial Supervisory Authority (FI), and move on. That routine is about to change. Beginning on 1 January 2027, the regulator will replace the existing reporting framework with an entirely new questionnaire that asks firms not simply what they do, but what kinds of risks they carry and how well their controls are built to contain them.

Australia's communications regulator has chosen its battles for the coming year, and the list says as much about where consumer harm is emerging as it does about where regulators believe industry performance still falls short. The Australian Communications and Media Authority's compliance and enforcement priorities for 2026–27 place emergency communications, telecommunications scams, consumer protections, and mobile device compliance at the center of its agenda.

Three times, CACEIS UK checked the Financial Services Register. Three times, it was presented with information showing that WealthTek lacked permission to hold certain client assets. Nothing happened that altered the course of the relationship. According to an enforcement action the UK's Financial Conduct Authority published Thursday, concluding that the asset servicing bank failed to respond appropriately to repeated warning signs while acting as WealthTek's sub-custodian.