FINMA cannot impose fines and must content itself with innocuous injunctions, as in the case of CBH. But that could change.

The banking supervisory authority would need real means of sanctioning offending establishments, otherwise its opinions will remain "regularly ignored", declared this banking law expert in the "SonntagsZeitung". Today, FINMA has only a limited range of sanctions, even if it finds gross shortcomings, for example in the fight against money laundering. It can publicly denounce these failures, order the bank to remedy them and confiscate the gains obtained illegally. But it cannot impose significant fines. In mid-November, FINMA announced the closure of proceedings concerning the HBC's Venezuelan funds. From 2012 to 2020, the bank “failed [its] obligations in the field of the fight against money laundering and seriously violated the law of supervision”, noted the FINMA.

In 2016, the bank was fined 50,000 francs by the Federal Department of Finance for failing to report a suspicious transaction. In 2014, she paid a million francs to the Geneva courts, in exchange for the closing of an investigation targeting a manager and an executive of the bank. In contrast, such punitive measures are missing from FINMA's decision last November. The authority simply ordered the HBC to fix the loopholes in its anti-money laundering system and drop all its Venezuelan customers. The bank must also verify its risky customers and break off relations with them if necessary.