Things that congresscritters say are not held to the highest standard of proof, but it might behoove you to look up what 'deceptive conduct' means in the context of this quote.
Actually, I'll save you the effort that you didn't bother to spend yourself, and tell you what it means, to the best of my understanding.
HSBC affiliates (not HSBC itself) in some countries were processing certain transactions that were exempt from a certain regulatory requirement concerning transferring money to people designated to be terroists. HSBC built a computer system to enforce this regulatory requirement. The affiliates omitted information in internal reports to avoid triggering the computer filter for these transactions, and HSBC was like "can you include this information?" and the affiliates were like "no, these transactions are exempt". This is what the quote refers to.
So this quote is blaming HSBC for not demanding other banks file transactions internally in a way they weren't required to so as to not automatically trigger a computer system they weren't required to automatically trigger. It is this practice that Congress is calling 'deceptive'. The committee doesn't identify to what extent this is a crime, probably because none of the transactions were identified by the committee as violating the regulation that nobody--not HSBC, not Congress--was requiring them to follow.
To boil it down more simply, the USA had sanctions on Iran long before other parts of the world did. Thus someone wishing to send money from the UK to Iran, for example, could do so through HSBC in London. Those transactions might well end up interfacing with US controlled infrastructure in some way and the US parts of HSBC were then routinely interfering with those payments, because America doesn't believe in sovereign independence. So now these local HSBC affiliates or divisions have a problem: their customers want to make perfectly legal transactions (legal in those areas) and the American computer systems are getting in the way. Simple solution: don't use any keywords that the USA doesn't like.
Years later this practice would be described as "money laundering" and "sanctions evasion". However it was in reality just a reasonable way to tackle an unreasonable problem.
HSBC was about Mexican drug money largely. "“These traffickers didn’t have to try very hard,” Breuer said at a press conference in Brooklyn. “They would sometimes deposit hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash in a single day into a single account using boxes designed to fit the precise dimension of the tellers’ windows in HSBC’s Mexico branches.”[1]
Actually, I'll save you the effort that you didn't bother to spend yourself, and tell you what it means, to the best of my understanding.
HSBC affiliates (not HSBC itself) in some countries were processing certain transactions that were exempt from a certain regulatory requirement concerning transferring money to people designated to be terroists. HSBC built a computer system to enforce this regulatory requirement. The affiliates omitted information in internal reports to avoid triggering the computer filter for these transactions, and HSBC was like "can you include this information?" and the affiliates were like "no, these transactions are exempt". This is what the quote refers to.
So this quote is blaming HSBC for not demanding other banks file transactions internally in a way they weren't required to so as to not automatically trigger a computer system they weren't required to automatically trigger. It is this practice that Congress is calling 'deceptive'. The committee doesn't identify to what extent this is a crime, probably because none of the transactions were identified by the committee as violating the regulation that nobody--not HSBC, not Congress--was requiring them to follow.