Knowing that poor comprehension levels among their customers will be sanctioned would give financial services firms an incentive to educate rather than obfuscate, and to offer products that align with rather than defy consumer expectations.
"HSBC has a commitment to adopt the highest compliance standards, and as a result we must apply enhanced oversight on any customer with connections to sanctioned countries," an HSBC spokeswoman, based in Dubai, wrote in an e-mail.
The Barclays settlement, which Judge Sullivan approved last week, involved charges that the British bank helped customers in Iran, Cuba and other sanctioned nations move more than $500 million into the United States, breaking federal law — and undermining national policy — for more than a decade.
"We have not only searched for bugs but exploited them, but only with the customer's sanction," she said.
In 1994, he spent a year at Whale Securities, a firm that was sanctioned repeatedly by regulators for gouging customers.
The N.F.A. has sanctioned six firms for failing to protect customer money over the last 15 years, according to regulatory records.
Complaining you are being "picked on", after customers boycott your hotel because the owner has just sanctioned stoning homosexuals to death?
They and their lawyers will surely argue that taking customer funds cannot be a crime or a fraud if it was sanctioned by the commodity commission rules.
The agency also sanctioned J.P. Morgan in 2009, accusing the bank of having customer accounts that were "insufficiently funded by approximately $750 million".
That's not pure hyperbole: The nature of the payment initiation process, as stipulated by Open Banking, means the customer is required to sanction any payment request within their own bank's app or website.
