Coutts has confirmed that a review of compensation claims for clients who invested in an AIG fund before the financial crisis in 2008 will take roughly two months longer than was initially expected.

“Because of the comprehensive nature of the review and that we have to look into all files before making a decision, it will take slightly longer than we first hoped,” a spokesperson for Coutts, the wealth division of Royal Bank of Scotland Group, told this publication.

Last year, the UK regulator fined Coutts £6.3 million (around $10 million) for failings linked to the sale of the AIG fund. Coutts agreed then to carry out a past business review, overseen by an independent third party and said that it will compensate “any customers identified by this review as having suffered loss as a result of an unsuitable recommendation on its part”.

Around 250 of Coutts’s clients invested £748 million in the fund which was suspended in September 2008.

The UK Financial Services Authority imposed another fine on Coutts last month of £8.75 million for failing to take reasonable care to establish and maintain effective anti-money laundering systems and controls relating to high-risk customers, including “politically exposed persons”. Coutts agreed to settle at an early stage and therefore qualified for a 30 per cent discount and told this publication that the fine will be incorporated into its first-quarter 2012 results.

In other recent developments, Coutts recently decided to sell its Latin American, Caribbean and African businesses to RBC Wealth Management, and instead concentrate all its efforts on the UK, Switzerland, Middle East, Russia/CIS and selected countries in Asia. The firm had client assets of £1.5 billion in the divisions it sold, accounting for only 2 per cent of all its AuM.