JPMorgan Gets Record £45m German Fine
The Wall Street bank failed to submit suspicious activity reports related to money laundering between October 2021 and September 2022.
Germany’s financial regulator said Thursday that it has handed a record fine of 45 million euros ($51.8m) to US banking giant JPMorgan Chase for failures in combating money laundering.
The Wall Street bank had “systematically failed to submit suspicious activity reports related to money laundering in a timely manner” between October 2021 and September 2022, the BaFin regulator said.
JPMorgan Chase had therefore “breached its supervisory duty”, BaFin said, and confirmed the fine, calculated according to the bank’s turnover, was the highest it had ever imposed.
Financial institutions are obliged to submit suspicious activity reports when they detect potentially illegal activity in a customer’s account.
A spokesperson for the bank said that the fine “relates to historical findings and the timing of our (suspicious activity report) filings did not impede any investigations by the authorities.
“We are deeply committed to detecting, preventing, and reporting money laundering and financial crimes, and are pleased that this matter is now resolved and remediated.”
The fine exceeds the 39-million-euro penalty imposed in 2015 on Germany’s leading bank, Deutsche Bank, for the same reason.
In March, Deutsche Bank also received a 23-million-euro fine from BaFin for violations in the sale of derivative products in Spain and other shortcomings in the operations of its subsidiary Postbank.
JPMorgan Chase is the largest bank in the United States in terms of assets and is also firmly established in Germany.
It plans to introduce its online bank, Chase, to the German market in the second quarter of 2026, after having launched it in the United Kingdom in 2021.
However, it will face strong competition in Germany by players such as N26, Revolut, and Trade Republic.
