Bank of Lithuania orders AML improvements at Swedbank

Chris Hamblin

15 February 2018

Swedbank, whose Lithuanian private banking personnel are based at offices in Vilnius, Kaunas and Klaipėda and who specialise in investment portfolio management and finance planning, has had to conduct a rigorous anti-money-laundering remediation exercise at the behest of the financial regulator there.

The central bank has issued Swedbank with a warning which, the Swedish bank has been quick to point out, is the lowest form of reprimand that it can impose. Nevertheless, a regulatory inspection in the autumn revealed problems in Swedbank's AML/TF regime during the period between January 2016 and March 2017.

Details are sketchy but Charlotte Elsnitz, the head of Baltic Banking at Swedbank, has commented: "Swedbank has already initiated actions to implement a series of measures aiming to improve its internal control systems, to ensure relevant customer due diligence data and to enhance processes and routines. Thereby, the deficiencies pointed out by Bank of Lithuania have partly already been corrected."

As of 24 October 2017 the group had total assets of 2,460 billion Swedish krona ; today it has assets of 2,213 krona .