The UK’s financial watchdog has hit banking giant HSBC with a £63.9 million fine for failings in its anti-money laundering processes. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) issued the punishment after finding “serious weaknesses” across HSBC’s automated systems used to monitor hundreds of millions of transactions a month to identify possible criminal activity. It highlighted three key failings which were found over the eight years from March 2010 to March 2018. This included failures to consider whether the scenarios it used until 2014 to identify money laundering and terrorist financing covered relevant risks, as well as “poor” risk assessment of new scenarios after 2016. The FCA also reported failures to “appropriately test and update the parameters” of the bank’s systems. HSBC was also found to be inadequately checking the accuracy and completeness of the data being fed into its monitoring systems. The bank did not dispute the findings and agreed to …