According to Finbold research, banks worldwide paid approximately $4.5 billion in fines larger than $500,000 in 2024 across 57 individual penalties.
Out of the figure, the United States imposed the largest dollar amount, levying $4.08 billion between 19 cases. Interestingly, though the US was responsible for just 33% of the penalties, it accounts for 90% of the value of all major 2024 bank fines.
Finbold’s 2024 Bank Fines Report also found that the United Kingdom ranked second in both total penalty amounts and number of cases, having imposed $261 million in ten separate actions.
Sweden and Finland followed in third and fourth place, with Swedish regulators issuing two fines and Finnish authorities issuing one.
The biggest bank fine of 2024 revealed
Elsewhere, Finbold research found that a single case dominated the US fines as Toronto-Dominion Bank (TD Bank) was ordered to pay $3.09 billion as a result of a probe conducted by the US Department of Justice (DoJ), the US Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey, the Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and the Federal Reserve.
TD Bank was found to have ‘failed to conduct adequate risk management and oversight of its retail banking operations,’ thus enabling the corporation’s American subsidiary to be used for money laundering.
Furthermore, anti-money laundering (AML) breaches were prevalent among the global 2024 cases that led to fines greater than $500,000.
The scale of the penalty imposed upon TD Bank is evidenced by the fact it accounted for 75.74% of the total $4.08 billion US amount and 68.67% of the $4.5 billion global amount.
Its size is also seen in the juxtaposition with the second biggest fine: the $348.20 million taken from JPMorgan Chase & Co due to the company’s ‘inadequate program to monitor firm and client trading activities for market misconduct.’
UK and Sweden lead Europe in 2024 bank fines
The biggest fine outside of the US was announced in January 2024 by British regulators. Specifically, the UK’s Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) fined HSBC Bank $74.12 million for failing to implement depositor protection.
The second-biggest fine outside North America—and the second-biggest one in Europe— came in the last months of the year, when Sweden penalized Klarna Bank AB for AML violations to the tune of $46 million.
Klarna is set to conduct its initial public offering (IPO) in 2025 and is expected to remedy its AML situation. However, Erik Blommé, the Director of Sweden’s Money Laundry Supervision, highlighted that the ruling was not an injunction and that, therefore, there is no clear timetable.
Finland’s decision to penalize Nordea Bank—an action that landed the Nordic country at the fourth spot by fine size, as it amounted to $35 million—is likewise interesting, as the action was linked to AML violations uncovered by the famous Panama Papers.
The case against Nordea Bank is made even more curious by the merit of it being one of the comparatively few results of the 2016 leak once expected to lead to a widespread crackdown on offshoring, money laundering, and other related activities.
China scores low on the list despite massive banking sector
Another finding in Finbold’s 2024 Bank Fines Report is China’s comparatively low number of cases. Only three instances were recorded in the country during the year, with the total amount collected coming in at $31.22 million.
Such a setup means that China is fifth on the list by the total fine size and fourth by the number of cases. The figure 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.
Lastly, the situation is made only more noteworthy given the global distribution of banks. While there is no definitive worldwide total, the cited figures generally range between 11,000 and 25,000.
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.
