Investigating how Fowler Oldfield evaded NatWest’s AML mechanisms for so long
Our Futures team looks at the FCA’s recent prosecution of NatWest, for failing to adequately monitor its customer’s accounts for signs of money laundering.
£1 million
per week
Over 5
years
£265 million
fine
On 13 December 2021 NatWest was fined approximately £256m after pleading guilty to three criminal charges of failing to adequately monitor its customer’s accounts for signs of money laundering between 2012 and 2016.
In this Banking Insight paper, Ben Tutt, FinCrime Threat Intelligence Lead in the BAE Systems Futures team, looks at the case in more detail.
As the quest to fight financial crime becomes ever more complex, Ben investigates how a criminal organisation managed to dupe this multi-national, seasoned bank for so long, and questions what the whole industry can learn from the case.
Read this report to learn:
- Overview of the case
- How Fowler Oldfield got away with it for so long
- What the industry can learn from the criminal operation
- What we are doing to tackle money laundering
What is the FinCrime Testing Service?
The FinCrime Testing Service simulates criminal and victim behaviours to test and quantify the performance of anti money laundering detection systems. Currently, it is difficult for regulated financial institutions to independently test how effective their anti money laundering detection systems are at catching real-world criminal behaviours.
$12 billion
is spent globally by banks each year on financial crime compliance
1 - 2%
of suspicious activity identified is likely to be of immediate value to Law Enforcement Agencies
75%
of financial crime compliance professionals don’t currently have an efficient way to test the effectiveness of their detection systems
“If anyone is thinking about using data testing services for financial crime purposes, this is the way to go. I don't think anyone else is trying to tackle the problem of poor detection in this way. Really innovative and a great idea… and I stand by every single word!!”
Francisco Mainez, Head of Business Financial Crime Risk Data and Analytics, Retail Banking at HSBC
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