BaFin Fines JPMorgan €45 Million for Delayed Money-Laundering Reports
Germany’s financial regulator BaFin fined JPMorgan’s Frankfurt branch €45 million after finding it failed to report suspicious transactions on time between 2021 and 2022.
Key Points
BaFin fined JPMorgan’s Frankfurt branch €45 million for delayed suspicious-transaction reports.
The delays occurred between October 2021 and September 2022, violating Germany’s anti–money-laundering law.
JPMorgan failed to send alerts promptly to Germany’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU).
The €45 million fine is BaFin’s largest penalty ever against a financial institution.
Deutsche Bank was previously fined €40 million in 2015 for similar AML reporting failures.
JPMorgan said the issue was historical and that its systems have been upgraded to ensure faster reporting.
Germany’s financial supervisor BaFin has fined JPMorgan Chase’s Frankfurt branch €45 million for delays in reporting suspicious transactions, the regulator said on Thursday.
BaFin found that the bank failed to submit several mandatory alerts between October 2021 and September 2022, as required under Germany’s money-laundering law. The agency said JPMorgan’s local systems did not ensure that suspicious cases were flagged and sent to the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) without delay.
The fine became legally binding on October 30. BaFin based the amount on the size of JPMorgan’s operations in Germany and the number of reporting failures.
German law requires banks to report potential money-laundering cases immediately so investigators can freeze or trace the funds. Penalties can be linked to a bank’s overall revenue if violations are considered systemic.
The €45 million penalty is BaFin’s largest on record, surpassing the €40 million fine against Deutsche Bank in 2015.
Germany has stepped up scrutiny of financial-crime controls since the Wirecard collapse in 2020, which exposed weak oversight of payment firms. Earlier this week, prosecutors arrested 18 suspects in a separate investigation into online-fraud and laundering networks using payment intermediaries.
A JPMorgan spokesperson said the issue related to earlier cases and that the late filings did not hinder any official investigations.
“We have improved our internal monitoring and reporting processes in Germany and are pleased the matter is resolved,” the spokesperson said.
BaFin said it is continuing inspections of banks in Germany to ensure compliance with anti-money-laundering requirements.
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