Former EPB employee discussing due diligence and internal issues.
In this email from Charlotte Grieve, she lies to Nick McKenzie, claiming that a former bank employee told her, “we would have to vet people in Google Search. That was it. That was the extent of the vetting. Google their name, see if they have a social media presence. Basically just make sure they were a real person. That was enough for them.” This was a complete lie. Nowhere in this email chain does any former bank employee write her anything close to that.
But she does include the actual text of an emailed she received from a former bank employee. What that employee actually wrote her contradicts everything Grieve told McKenzie. He flat-out told her how strict compliance was, how most applications got rejected, and how the bank cared more about keeping bad actors from getting accounts than it did about its own profits. I’ve copied part of that email below.
“With regard to the red flags: It’s hard for me to say right now but if I had to guess, I’d wager that most of the applications we got to the bank didn’t even make it to the prescreening call because the red flags they raised were absurd and comically ridiculous. “I want to send 50 trillion USD (an actual amount someone applied with) from North Korea to you for my commodities company’ ” GET LOST!!! “I don’t ever want to pay taxes again” Yeah good luck with that buddy but you ain’t getting an account at this bank. Goodbye. “I want to open a personal account and send 147,632,558.71 GBP and when you email me back to ask why I will threaten to sue you; I’m a big fancy lawyer in the UK you know…” On and on… you get the picture. If we as a bank were to accept any of these as clients and they sent us funds which we are willing to accept our intermediary, if they are paying attention which they basically always are, would have a stroke at the risks we’re taking and our institutional relationship with them would be over quicker than a tinder hook up! Our banking licence would also likely be revoked in those instances though I’m not exactly privy to the nuances of those rules. Where it gets tricky is when the red flags aren’t exactly smacking you in the face and these are the prospective clients that will require an interview…Now let’s say that he wants to accept/send cash from/to a third party i.e from/to accounts he
doesn’t own (so now we’re about talking third part wires) this is where things get interesting. Who’s sending the wires? Who are you sending the wires to? What’s your relationship to them? What’s the economic purpose of the wires? Amounts and frequency of the wires to be sent/received? Supporting
documentation? Previous corporate bank statements? Websites? Literally any info I can get my hands on…. In conclusion (of course I can only speak for my time at EPB) the bank comes first. ALWAYS! It’s better to lose a potential account that may make loads of $$$ but seems a bit sketch than lose a corresponding bank relationship because you were either too lazy or too greedy or too blind to spot the
red flags. Sorry if my answer is a bit long winded but it really is the only way I can show you what I mean by trained to spot red\flags. They can literally be anything that just seems vague or off or implausible and are often situational depending on the application at hand. It’s maybe easier to think about the job being
more a case of me being able to say in a straight forward manner what this individual wants the account for when asked by my boss or the wire team or a corresponding bank etc. I heard the acronyms KYC and AML on an almost hourly basis.”