Monday was a black day for banking stocks, especially for all those cited in money laundering cases. An investigation by the International Congress of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) revealed on Sunday, from documents obtained by the American news and alert site BuzzFeed News, that astronomical amounts of dirty money have passed through the world's largest banking institutions for years. Le Soir mentions the figure of 2,000 billion dollars.

The various newspapers that are part of this consortium pin ING, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, StanChart and JPMorgan.

Polish subsidiary of ING

According to these 'FinCEN Files', which are based on confidential US documents, two obscure Dutch companies, which were doing business with the Polish subsidiary ING Bank Slaski, are key players in the flight of capital from Russia to the West. ING stated that it had already terminated the customer relationship with one of the parties in 2018 and was in the process of doing the same with the other. Suspicious transactions occur between the years 2000 and 2017. For ING, which had to pay a fine of 775 million euros for a money laundering case almost two years ago, this is another blow. ING shares lost 9%.

HSBC at its lowest level in 25 years

Another bank in focus is HSBC after the English-language Chinese nationalist daily Global Times reported that the Anglo-Saxon banking group could be one of the first to be included on a "list of unreliable entities" by Beijing, as part of retaliatory measures against some foreign countries, foremost among them the United States. HSBC defended itself by replying to journalists that it had always complied with its legal obligations to report suspicious activity. The stock HSBC hit its lowest level in 25 years on Monday.

Luc Meurant, CEO of the fintech Neterium specialized in the detection of financial crimes, is "not surprised" by these new revelations since it is only about 1% of illegal financial transfers that are blocked. However, he warns about the "somewhat sensational" side of the information as banks have already "worked a lot" to improve their anti-money laundering procedures. The suspicious activity report to be given to regulators is in his eyes a "transparency approach". Is this enough? "Probably not." How to improve the situation? First, regulators should provide feedback on suspicious transactions. "In many countries, the return of the regulator is not always very good. There is an effort to be made. The problem with bleaching is that the methods used are very sophisticated," says Luc Meurant.