With the Finnish broadcasting company Yle having aired a damning report on the alleged involvement of Scandinavia's biggest bank in the laundering of dirty money, both the bank and the Finnish Financial Supervisory Authority are reportedly admitting that they have not been doing enough to combat the problem. The regulator is consequently setting up a dedicated team.

Nordea, the bank in question, is listed on the Copenhagen Stock Exchange, the Helsinki Stock Exchange and the Stockholm Stock Exchange and operates in both the Nordic and Baltic regions with more than 1,400 branches. Its private banking activities are extensive, although it has recently sold part of its private banking operation to UBS Europe.

Yle's website says: "Nordea and Kremlin washing machine: The big leak reveals that hundreds of millions of euros of money from suspicious sources have passed through Nordea. The documents...show us how European banks are interacting with huge Russian-based money laundering businesses."

Samu Kurri, the head of FIN-FSA's (Finanssivalvonta's) institutional supervision department, told Yle that a new 11-man unit set up specifically to combat money laundering will allow his regulatory body to oversee the problem to a far more satisfactory degree. He looked forward to carrying out more inspections than before and coming up with more precise risk profiles.

He said that the new team was going to introduce measures "closer to the international level" and admitted, according to Yle: "We have looked in the mirror and changed our procedures...We are reacting in advance to the likely recommendations. We in the Nordic countries have been too gullible regarding money laundering."

An internal FIN-FSA report about money laundering is looming and this might contain further recommendations.

This development is one of the latest to rock the Nordic banking world, bringing to the fore its former willingness to service the needs of Russian HNWs a little too diligently.

Reuters reports that the reveleations about Danske Bank and its correspondent, Deutsche Bank, have done Nordic compliance salaries a power of good: "The recruitment drive in the Nordic region...has been given extra impetus by a money laundering scandal at Denmark’s Danske Bank, which has spread to some other lenders in Sweden and Finland.

"'We’ve become the new ‘business rock stars,' a Copenhagen-based compliance person told Reuters. He saw a 50% jump in wages the last time he changed job to almost 1.2 million Danish crowns ($182,000) per year and is regularly contacted by headhunters."

The newswire also reported that the highest-paid 10% of financial compliance managers in Copenhagen now earned more than 1.2 million crowns (£138,358) per annum.

"Danske Bank said last month it would take on an extra 600 compliance and anti-money laundering staff this year. It has already quadrupled the number since 2015 to 1,200," it has said.

American financial activist Bill Browder has, in his own words, "filed criminal complaints" against Nordea in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. Officials in the first three of these countries are investigating. Browder claims that Nordea handled vast sums of suspect funds; Yle has pushed the estimated total up to €700 million.