The High Court has dismissed a claim brought by a company against a bank for knowing receipt and unjust enrichment in relation to funds received by the bank in the context of an authorised push payment fraud (APP): Tecnimont Arabia Ltd v National Westminster Bank plc [2022] EWHC 1172 (Comm). Read more

The Hong Kong government has gazetted amendments to the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorist Financing Ordinance (AMLO) to enhance Hong Kong’s anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing (AML/CFT) regulatory regime. The amendments will be introduced into the Legislative Council (LegCo) for first reading on 6 July 2022. Read more

This briefing summarises the new Russia sanctions measures introduced by the UK on 23 June 2022 and provides a round-up of other key UK and EU developments since our last sanctions tracker post. Read more

We have updated our Operational Resilience timeline to include key recent developments from the UK, EU, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and international standard setting bodies.  Operational resilience is the ability to 'prevent, adapt, respond to, recover and learn from operational disruptions'. Read more

Recent years have seen growing scrutiny of the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in financial services and a greater awareness of the potential of these technologies. It is no surprise that questions of AI fairness and bias are increasingly front of mind. Existing law is not keeping up with the rise and speed of new technology. With UK Finance, we have published a white paper, as a contribution to the debate on how to apply ethical principles in practice to the benefit of firms and customers. Our use of practical scenarios has helped refine our understanding of the fair use of AI and the practical challenges of building a high-level ethical framework. Read more

At the moment, the FCA's only powers over crypto businesses which do not carry on investment, payment services, e-money or other UK regulated business come from its role as their anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing supervisor. This will change in due course in respect of stablecoin businesses (with HMT consulting on bringing these into scope) and in respect of financial promotions of certain cryptoassets (both HMT and FCA are consulting on this). Read more

The UK voted to leave the European Union on 23 June 2016 and then officially ceased to be an EU Member State on 31 December 2020. Nearly five years later, the long drawn-out process of Brexit has still not come to an end, as the UK and EU continue to clash over borders and trade issues.  In this article, we review some key aspects of the ways in which the securitisation regulatory regime differs between the UK and the EU, and consider where the two paths may lead in the future. Read more

The Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) has proposed a number of sweeping enforcement-related reforms which would significantly enhance the SFC’s ability to obtain investor compensation orders against regulated persons who have committed wrongdoing. Read more