Finbold’s 2024 Bank Fines Report found that 57 fines larger than $500,000 were issued to banks worldwide in 2024 due to a wide range of violations for a total penalty sum of $4.5 billion. (ref. https://finbold.com/report/bank-fines-2024 )
According to Finbold research, anti-money laundering (AML) breaches were the most common violation, and Toronto-Dominion Bank (TD Bank) was forced to pay $3.09 billion over related failures.
Furthermore, TD Bank’s fine accounted for 68.67% of the amount levied in 2024, while the US regulators collected $4.08 billion—slightly more than 90% of the cumulative global amount.
UK and Sweden lead Europe trail behind the US
British and Swedish regulators were responsible for the largest fines outside the US. In the UK, HSBC Bank was penalized with $74.12 million for failing to implement depositor protection, while in Sweden, Klarna Bank AB was compelled to pay $46 million over AML issues.
Finland, whose fines totaled $35 million, found itself in the fourth stop. The country’s enforcement is also notable for involving Nordea Bank’s failures to prevent money laundering and other criminal activities, as revealed by the 2016 Panama Papers.
China imposed only $31 million in bank fines in 2024
Elsewhere, China may be the biggest surprise of the report. Despite boasting the world’s second-biggest economy by nominal gross domestic product (GDP), it was only fourth in the total number of cases, at three, and fifth in the total penalty amount, at $31.22 million.
As Andreja Stojanovic, a co-author of the research, pointed out:
“In the US, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) insures just over 4,000 such corporations, aligning the American case proportion with the dominance of the country’s banking sector. Despite imposing substantially lower and fewer fines, China is also cited as having more than 4,000 banking institutions.”
Lastly, the figure for China does not change much for those who prioritize the ‘one country’ over the ‘two systems,’ as there was only one case in Hong Kong, which resulted in a relatively small fine of $510,000.
Read the full story with statistics here: https://finbold.com/us-accounted-for-90-of-global-bank-fines-imposed-in-2024-finbold-report/