Too much shortcomings on the anti-money laundering front. This is the reason with which the Bank of Italy prohibited the German N26 from undertaking “transactions with new customers” in Italy and offering “new products and services to existing customers”, for example in cryptoassets such as cryptocurrencies. Starting with Bitcoins.
The ban arrived yesterday evening from Palazzo Koch following a supervisory inspection which began on 25 October and ended on 17 December 2021. The authority’s checks revealed “significant shortcomings in compliance with anti-money laundering legislation”. And for this reason, the prohibited operations include “the opening of new ongoing relationships or the carrying out of any operation, even occasional, with customers not already registered”.
And for this reason the bank “intends to continue to strengthen its controls in this area in order to remove the shortcomings identified”. The ban will last until the “removal of the identified shortcomings”, but “will not impact the bank’s existing customers, whose accounts will continue to be fully operational and secure.”
However, N26 explains that it has «already made significant investments in anti-money laundering, both globally and in relation to the Italian branch. The investments led to significant progress in the area of anti-money laundering prevention, thanks to the strengthening of the staff dedicated to the structure, the development of the IT infrastructure to support and machine learning models, as well as the strengthening of the active transaction monitoring systems 24 / 7 “.
Founded in 2013 by Valentin Stalf and Maximilian Tayenthal, the bank has 7 million customers in 24 different countries: 750,000 are in Italy.