Banks globally have paid $321 billion in fines since 2008 for an abundance of regulatory failings from money laundering to market manipulation and terrorist financing, according to data from Boston Consulting Group.
Bloomberg reports that tally is set to increase in the coming years as European and Asian regulators catch up with their more aggressive U.S. peers, who have levied the majority of charges to date, BCG says in its seventh annual study of the industry published today. Banks paid $42 billion in fines in 2016 alone, a 68% rise on the previous year, the data shows.
“As conduct-based regulations evolve, fines and penalties, along with related legal and litigation expenses, will remain a cost of doing business,” analysts led by Gerold Grasshoff write. “Managing those costs will continue to be a major task for banks.”
The era of ever-increasing regulatory requirements is here to stay, BCG says, despite President Donald Trump’s pledge to roll back the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act that reshaped U.S. banking in the aftermath of the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. The number of rule changes that banks must track on a daily basis has tripled since 2011, to an average of 200 revisions a day, according to the report.
