Two American subsidiaries of the French bank BNP Paribas will pay a fine of 15 million dollars in total to American banking regulators in order to avoid prosecution for not having respected the rules of the fight against money laundering. In a statement Thursday, FINRA, a financial industry regulator, said it had fined BNP Securities Corp and BNP Paribas Prime Brokerage. They are accused of not having put in place an effective system for detecting the risks of money laundering between February 2013 and March 2017. They had nevertheless carried out numerous transactions in very low value company securities ("penny stocks ") for hundreds of millions of dollars, without implementing an effective suspicious transaction detection program. Until 2016, the French bank's anti-money laundering program "did not include monitoring suspicious transactions involving + penny stocks +", accuses the American authority. She also deplores the fact that a single employee was responsible for monitoring some 70,000 transactions involving 233 billion dollars that took place over two years, including transfers in foreign currencies. "When customers are engaged in high-risk transactions involving very low-rated securities and foreign currencies, the banking establishment must devote sufficient resources to its anti-money laundering program", adds FINRA. At the end of this amicable agreement, BNP Paribas has neither acknowledged nor disputed these reproaches but pays the fine and has 90 days to bring its anti-money laundering program up to standard.