By Jack Kelly:
Today the US Treasury Department announced “one of the largest sanctions actions in its history,” levied against 271 individuals in response to the recent chemical attack against civilians in the Khan Sheikhoun region of Syria.
Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, said, “We take Syria’s disregard for innocent human life very seriously, and will relentlessly pursue and shut down the financial networks of all individuals involved with the production of chemical weapons used to commit these atrocities.”
In lighter news, Goldman Sachs is taking employee reviews to the next level. Goldman has started a new employee review program in which coworkers could offer real-time feedback about their managers and peers.
The bank’s new system is based off of an existing platform currently used and now deployed to the rest of Goldman’s 35,000 employees. Instead of waiting until the end of the year, now you can hear how bad you are on a regular basis. Also, it has to be fun for the Goldmanites to bash their annoying coworkers and jerky bosses with real-time feedback.
Some of the work, in part, that will be placed under our AI overlords include sorting through volumes of voice and video recordings to ensure the bank’s professionals are complying with the rules.
While the German bank is under assault from supposedly friendly technology which will surely rise-up and turn against the workers, French banks celebrated a former French banker’s presidential campaign with a huge market rally. It’s a good day to be a French banker. Yesterday, Emmanuel Macron won the first round of France’s presidential election and is a strong favorite to defeat far-right populist Marine Le Pen (take this with a grain of salt, as the mass media also predicted Hillary Clinton winning the US Presidential election, and England remaining in the European Union. Perhaps Macron will win or the media will be 0-3) in the second round in two weeks. Macron, a centrist, never has held elected office but boasts a four-year stint at investment bank Rothschild.
European markets and elites breathed a near-audible sigh of relief that Macron is probably heading for the presidency. The euro jumped, French government bonds rallied, and the region’s stocks surged—France’s stock market gained more than 4% and Germany’s set an all-time record. The biggest winners were the banks, not just in France, but across Europe. The market value of France’s biggest bank, BNP Paribas, jumped by a whopping €6 billion ($6.5 billion) in early trading.
Like politics, every so often the tides shift in favor of a certain profession. For a long time Compliance was blazing hot. It looks like Cyber Security is the next new thing. Raytheon, the large defense contractor, paid its top cyber security executive $12.5 million.
Wajsgras is president of Raytheon’s Intelligence, Information and Services (IIS) business, which focuses on cyber security, sensors and imaging technology, and guidance systems for ships and aircraft.
The guys at Wells Fargo are not so lucky. Wells Fargo & Co directors could have avoided a shareholder backlash over a sales practices scandal if they had paid more attention to scores of whistleblowers who complained, in vain, for years.
A slow response to warnings is not unique to Wells Fargo, but it is an immediate concern at the third-largest U.S. bank, whose board is facing a no-confidence vote at its annual shareholder meeting on Tuesday.
Wells Fargo has been engulfed in scandal since September, when it reached a $190 million settlement with regulators over complaints that its retail banking staff had opened as many as 2.1 million unauthorized client accounts. The bank fired 5,300 employees for improper sales tactics over five years, but did not make more substantive changes to policies and procedures or hold managers accountable until there was a public outcry.
A third-party investigation commissioned by the board found such practices were not flagged as “a noteworthy risk” until 2014, even thought lawsuits and complaints suggested the problem existed at least as far back as 2010.
Influential proxy advisor Institutional Shareholder Services recommended shareholders vote against 12 of its 15 directors, including Chairman Stephen Sanger, arguing directors failed in their oversight duties for years leading up to the settlement.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that several directors were at risk of losing re-election based on a tally of those who have already cast ballots.
The post Sad Wells Fargo Directors, Syrian Sanctions, Sacrebleu-the French elections, and the Success of AI appeared first on Compliancex.
April 25, 2017 at 02:22AM
from The Compliance Exchange
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