HSBC has had a history of money-laundering lapses. It was fined a decade ago in the US for its role in enabling Latin American drug cartels, and in the UK in 2021 for a string of failures including serving the leader of a criminal gang.
So it is understandable that the bank and its peer Standard Chartered might not be keen to take crypto exchanges as clients in Hong Kong.
“Like come on. They are here for crime,” Binance’s then-chief compliance officer Samuel Lim said in a 2020 chat about some of its customers, according to a court filing by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — the kind of statement that does little to endear either it or its rivals to large and highly-regulated banks.