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Financial Services Law Insights and Observations

Senators exploring bank’s dealings with collapsed crypto exchange

Federal Issues Digital Assets U.S. Senate Cryptocurrency Risk Management Bank Secrecy Act Anti-Money Laundering FinCEN Financial Crimes

Federal Issues

On January 30, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), John Kennedy (R-LA), and Roger Marshall (R-KS) sent a follow-up letter to a California-based bank asking for additional responses to questions related to the bank’s relationship with several cryptocurrency firms founded by the CEO of a now-collapsed crypto exchange. As previously covered by InfoBytes, the senators pressed the CEO for an explanation for why the bank failed to monitor for and report suspicious transactions to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, and asked for information about how deposits it was holding on behalf of the collapsed exchange and related firm were being handled. The senators stressed that the bank has a legal responsibility under the Bank Secrecy Act to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program that may have flagged suspicious activity.

In the letter, the senators accused the bank of evading their previous questions in its December response, writing that while the bank’s answers confirm the extent of its failure to monitor and report suspicious financial activity, it failed “to provide key information needed by Congress to understand why and how these failures occurred.” The bank’s “repeated reference to ‘confidential supervisory information’” as a justification for its refusal to provide the requested information “is simply not an acceptable rationale,” the senators said. They also noted that the bank’s recent advance from the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco—intended “to ‘stave off a further run on deposits’”—has introduced additional crypto market risks into the traditional banking system, especially should the bank fail. The bank was asked to explain how it plans to use the $4.3 billion it received.

The senators further commented that additional findings have revealed that neither the Federal Reserve nor the bank’s independent auditors were able to identify the “extraordinary gaps” in the bank’s due diligence process. The senators asked the bank to provide responses to questions related to its risk management policies, as well as how many safety and soundness exams were conducted, and whether any of the bank’s executives were “held accountable” for the failures related to the collapsed exchange, among other things.