The biggest AML penalties of 2025, and what they had in common
In 2025, regulators handed down some of the largest anti-money-laundering penalties on record. Different institutions, different regulators, different countries. The failures behind almost every one were the same.
2025's costliest compliance failures
Ranked by penalty size. Each one traces back to a gap that screening and monitoring were supposed to close.
Staff helped users bypass identity verification. More than $5B in suspicious transactions went unmonitored.
Pleaded guilty to Bank Secrecy Act violations. Operated without an effective AML program.
Years of transaction monitoring and customer due diligence failures.
High-risk clients left unmonitored. Around £46.8M in criminal funds passed through undetected.
Weak AML oversight and gaps in suspicious transaction reporting.
Onboarded more than 34,000 high-risk customers with weak ongoing monitoring.
More than 30 million transactions worth around €176B were left unscreened.
Figures reflect publicly announced regulatory penalties from 2025 and represent headline amounts reported at the time of each action. Sources: US Department of Justice, UK Financial Conduct Authority, US Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Central Bank of Ireland. This page is for general information and is not legal advice.
Different cases. Same three failures.
Strip away the logos and the regulators, and nearly every penalty above comes back to one of these.
Customers were onboarded without proper identity verification, or checks stopped after sign-up. The institution never really knew who it was dealing with.
Suspicious activity moved through accounts without flags. The volume was there to catch, but the monitoring wasn't built to see it.
Risk status was checked once and never revisited. A customer who became a PEP or a sanctioned entity slipped through unnoticed.
The cost of non-compliance keeps climbing. The cost of getting it right doesn't have to.
Every case on this board points back to the same gaps Sentinel ™ was built to close: continuous identity verification, real-time monitoring, and screening that never stops after onboarding, all with a complete audit trail to prove it at examination.
Make sure your institution never lands on next year's board.
A short walkthrough of Sentinel ™ will show you where the gaps behind these penalties could exist in your own program, and how to close them.