By PYMNTS | October 14, 2026
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is reportedly investigating the chain of companies surrounding payments firm Euro Exchange Securities.
This probe comes after British authorities seized Euro Exchange in June for possible anti-money laundering (AML) violations, Bloomberg News reported Wednesday (Oct. 14).
The DOJ is seeking information from the court-appointed administrators handling the wind-down of Euro Exchange and sent a subpoena to Banex International Bank, a related company in Puerto Rico, sources familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.
The U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) launched an investigation into possible offenses at Euro Exchange last month, after forcing the company to cease regulated activities in June. The regulator had alleged Euro Exchange presented “unacceptable money-laundering risks,” before moving the firm into insolvency a week later, the report added.
PYMNTS has contacted Euro Exchange for comment but has not yet gotten a reply.
Euro Exchange is one of the U.K.’s electronic-money institutions, which — per Bloomberg — are loosely-regulated payments firms that processed about 4.3 billion pounds (or $5.7 billion) of transactions every day last year, according to FCA data.
While the authority has given several of these companies permission to operate, it has become worried in recent years about fraud and lax anti-crime controls in the industry, the report added.
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Euro Exchange processed 2.1 billion pounds of transactions during a 12-month period before its seizure, nearly all on behalf of just 14 clients that it had determined posed a “high risk” of money laundering, Bloomberg has reported.
Euro Exchange and Banex are among a group of companies headed by Miami-based businessman Luis Gasparini, Bloomberg said.
When regulators in Puerto Rico seized Banex in September, they said the company was insolvent and saddled with “serious financial, operational, accounting and control deficiencies,” the report said.
The Office of the Commissioner of Financial Institutions, or OCIF, also alleged that depositors’ funds had been misappropriated by Gasparini.
In other AML-related news, PYMNTS wrote in August about banks’ need for tools that can bring accounts, merchants, cash activity, peer-to-peer payments, travel spending and external intelligence into a single picture.
While things like artificial intelligence and graph analytics could help, that’s only if they improve judgment instead of just producing another set of alerts.
“A better system would identify how parties relate to one another, whether the relationship makes sense, where money moves next, and whether behavior changes after law enforcement or regulatory scrutiny increases,” that report said.
“It would also help compliance officers distinguish between legitimate migrant support payments and activity that may finance criminal smuggling networks.”