FinCEN Assesses Historic $80 Million Penalty Against Canaccord Genuity LLC for Securities Fraud-Related Bank Secrecy Act Violations

FinCEN found Canaccord failed to investigate and report securities fraud despite receiving clear red flags over multiple years. The violation was not a failure to see the signals but a failure to produce durable records showing who evaluated each alert, what evidence they weighed, and why they concluded a SAR was or was not warranted. A decision artifact—owner, rationale, evidence, timestamp—would have created accountability at the moment of evaluation and made the gap between signal and response visible to oversight before enforcement. Every suspicious activity decision deserves engineering rigor, not post-hoc reconstruction.