Bermuda’s willingness to name and shame financial institutions that fail to adequately comply with money-laundering regulations and controls has been positively highlighted overseas.

And it has been contrasted with a Canadian authority’s unwillingness to do the same.

The Toronto Star ran a story headlined “Bermuda names fined banks while Canada keeps them secret,” where it observed that the Bermuda Monetary Authority had named Sun Life Financial Investments (Bermuda) for failing to adequately comply with anti-money laundering and antiterrorist financing laws, and fined it $1.5 million.

It mentioned that in January 2016, Jeremy Cox, the BMA chief executive officer, announcing the island’s new transparency policy, had said: “(Increased transparency) is intended to demonstrate to those who rely on our supervisory adjudications that their trust is not misplaced and that Bermuda-based entities found to be deficient in meeting their obligations run the risk of being required to account publicly for their actions.”

The Toronto Star, Canada’s largest newspaper by readership, noted that Canada’s anti-money laundering agency Fintrac, last year fined a bank C$1.5 million for compliance breaches. However, the agency refused to name the bank, claiming that the penalty fee “alone would be deterrence enough for the banking industry”.

Last week, on the same day the BMA announced the fine against Sun Life, Canadian bank Manulife voluntarily admitted that it was the unnamed institution fined by Fintrac ten months earlier. It said the penalty “essentially related to administrative lapses in reporting to Fintrac”.

In the Toronto Star article, Christine Duhaime, an anti-money laundering expert said financial regulators around the world are moving towards default transparency, but Canada was falling behind.

In a statement last week, Niall O’Hare, president, Sun Life Financial Investments, said the company was co-operating with the BMA and had agreed to “implement appropriate controls to ensure that we are in compliance with both the licence restrictions and applicable regulations moving forward”.