ING CEO Ralph Hamers will step down from his position and leave ING as of 30 June. After 29 years at ING he will join UBS on 1 September and will become the new Group Chief Executive Officer of UBS as of 1 November 2020. Ralph, who has been ING’s CEO over the past six years, has transformed ING into a leading digital bank, and has put ING on the path to becoming the go-to financial platform for customers. The UBS Board made the decision to appoint Ralph Hamers as successor of Group CEO Sergio P. Ermotti following a thorough and rigorous selection process, reflecting the firm’s commitment to strong corporate governance. Continue reading…

Although residential and commercial real estate prices are increasingly moving in sync and the role of international investors is growing, this does not mean that there is a global real estate market, a report by the Committee on the Global Financial System finds. Property price dynamics: domestic and international drivers documents recent trends in residential and commercial property prices in over 20 countries, gives an overview of key drivers of price developments and describes policy initiatives used to manage associated risks to the economy and financial stability.

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Congratulations to Nicola Allocca for this well-deserved appointment. We are particularly pleased because we have known Nicola from the beginning of our venture with Risk & Compliance ITALIA and we published his articles about the necessity to eradicating the corruption “cancer” and possible solutions. Legality, NoCorruptionZone, Integrity, Visionary Disobedience are the objectives for which he strives for and the first keywords that come to mind that we associate with his person. This recognition confirms to his valuable and continuous engagement on different levels, not only within his company (AST), but also in the international forum at OECD and in many activities at the university and institutional level.  Continue reading…

by Geert Vermeulen

This article is the first of a series of five articles and will be published in five parts. The second part will be published next week. Often ethics & compliance officers only end up in the news when things have gone wrong. Like in the recent money laundering scandals in the banking industry. In many of these cases, it was actually the management that decided that doing business was more important than being compliant and didn’t invest sufficiently in proper compliance controls and resources. Many people don’t realise that ethics & compliance officers also prevent numerous crimes. Continue reading…

by Branislav Hock

Airbus is yet another company that resolved its corruption out of the court. But buying a good ethical standing is becoming more complex. After all, a time when the US was the only country offering a settlement to a French company has passed. Paying massive bribes in China to sell aircraft interests many countries. Escaping prosecution is newly for sale in other countries as well. And the fact that France, the UK, and US were able to sell Airbus at a £3 billion settlement shows that this is a lucrative business. Continue reading…

In September 2016, Wells Fargo, a bank with its head office in San Francisco, California came under fire for a huge scandal, which involved accusations of fraudulent sales practices. Employees of the bank opened around 3.2 million fake accounts due to the fact that the culture at Wells Fargo put a lot of pressure onto its employees to reach unrealistic sales goals, causing some employees to even break the law. Since the scandal broke out, the bank has relieved about 5,300 employees due to their illegal behavior and has also gotten rid of the extreme sales goals. The bank was also investigated by Federal prosecutors and Congressional overseers and California, Illinois and Chicago have all put their business partnership with the bank on hold since the event. Continue reading…

by Michel Klompmaker

The Green Swan is a book written by qualified professionals from the Banque De France and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). It examines the link between the effects of climate change and the stability of the financial sector. It also provides an in-depth survey of how global warming has slowly integrated into macroeconomic models and how they have progressively evolved to form better assessments of stability risks that arise from the phenomenon of climate change. On the other hand, this book also acknowledges the limitations of models and how they may not be able to accurately foresee the financial and economic impact of climate change. Continue reading…

by Ahsan Habib

It seems to be a reasonable enough assumption that a dedicated money launderer would be able to utilise crowdfunding to wash their dirty money.The features facilitating the exploitation of crowdfunding for money laundering include the lack of legal regulations imposing a direct obligation to identify clients of crowdfunding platforms, as well as the absence of supervision of their activities. This can generate such threats as the mingling of income from legal and illegal sources, transferring criminal proceeds to persons conducting crowdfunding, and legitimating assets through the organisation of crowdfunding campaigns.
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The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Bank of England have recently set out their intentions to augment their data and analytics aptitudes. They both rely on the availability to high-quality data to meet their individual targets of both continuing monetary and financial stability, market integrity, effective competition and consumer protection. The FCA’s invigorated Data Strategy sets out a transformation plan to turn into an exceptionally information driven controller. The system indicates the organisation’s increasing focus on the use of cutting-edge analytics and automation strategies to provide more depth into the comprehending of how markets work and enable the FCA to productively foresee, monitor and react to firm and market issues.
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The new president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has sworn to acquaint GDPR-style legislation to oversee artificial intelligence (AI). Ursula von der Leyen has made the following comments on this pledge by stating, “With the GDPR, we set the pattern for the world. We have to do the same with artificial intelligence. It is not about damming up the flow of data. It is about making rules that define how to handle data responsibly. For us, the protection of a person’s digital identity is the overriding priority.”
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