Financial Supervisory Authority of Norway finds anti-money laundering compliance deficiencies at Rogaland Sparebank and requires progress reporting

The Financial Supervisory Authority of Norway (Finanstilsynet) published a report from a document-based inspection of Rogaland Sparebank, launched after media allegations of unlawful loan brokerage in the Stavanger area, to assess the bank’s compliance with anti-money laundering rules for customers and transactions linked to the case. The review identified shortcomings, and the bank has prepared a remediation action plan. Finanstilsynet concluded that the bank had not carried out sufficiently robust enhanced customer due diligence and that customer information gathering on the purpose and intended nature of relationships was too generic, reducing the ability to detect abnormal behaviour and contributing to both missed and potentially false-positive transaction monitoring alerts. The supervisor also flagged weaknesses in risk classification, including automated downscaling of risk levels without an adequate manual decision process, and found that ongoing monitoring and alert handling were too generally designed and insufficiently documented, with unclear evidence that alert closures were based on substantive investigations. In addition, the bank did not meet record-keeping requirements for a past report to Økokrim from 2015, as it no longer held documentation or a copy. Rogaland Sparebank must report on the status of its action plan on a semi-annual basis, with the first reporting as at 31 December 2025, and Finanstilsynet noted it may request assessments of how implemented measures have worked in practice.