The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) levied a $350 million fine against American Express National Bank for deficiencies in its Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) and anti-money laundering (AML) compliance program.
The OCC determined that the bank failed to establish and maintain a BSA/AML compliance program reasonably designed to monitor compliance with the BSA. The OCC found that the bank’s program had inadequate resources, including staff without sufficient expertise, systemic internal control gaps, weak independent testing, and weak BSA/AML training for employees and directors.
Also, the OCC found that the bank failed to tailor its BSA/AML risk assessment to its business activities. The bank focused on the risks in its relatively narrow demand deposit account products and services but did not focus enough on the risks in its more dominant credit and charge card products. In addition, the bank’s customer due diligence processes and customer identification program procedures contributed to the bank’s monitoring and reporting failures.
Overall, the bank experienced systemic breakdowns in its suspicious activity monitoring and reporting processes, resulting in a failure to sufficiently report approximately $13 billion of suspected trade-based money laundering activity that took place over the past decade.
“The OCC expects banks of American Express’s size and complexity to devote sufficient resources to ensure compliance with laws and regulations designed to detect and prevent money laundering, which are critical to both economic and national security,” Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould said. “American Express failed to maintain a BSA/AML compliance program properly aligned with the money laundering risks of its operations, which resulted in the bank’s failures to timely identify and report significant missed suspicious activity and to provide important information to law enforcement. Today’s actions will serve to focus American Express on properly addressing such risks as it continues to serve its customers.”
The OCC is taking these actions in coordination with a concurrent cease-and-desist order against American Express and American Express Travel Related Services Company by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.
The Federal Reserve Board’s enforcement action against American Express calls on it to address, among other things, the firm’s failure to sufficiently detect and report certain suspicious activity related to money laundering. The Fed also identified significant deficiencies in how American Express Company’s enterprise-wide anti-money laundering program was implemented, in particular at the firm’s subsidiary national bank.