Biggest banks fined $321 billion since financial crisis

Banks paid $42 billion in fines in 2016 alone, a 68% rise on the previous year

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.

That tally is set to increase in the coming years as European and Asian regulators catch up with their more aggressive US peers, who have levied the majority of charges to date, BCG said in its seventh annual study of the industry published Thursday. Banks paid $42 billion in fines in 2016 alone, a 68 per cent rise on the previous year, the data showed.

"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 wrote. "Managing those costs will continue to be a major task for banks."

The era of ever-increasing regulatory requirements is here to stay, BCG said, despite President Donald Trump’s pledge to roll back the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act that reshaped US 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.

"Regulation must be considered a permanent rise in sea level — not just a flowing tide that will ebb or even a cresting tsunami that will recede," the authors wrote. "We expect this theme to hold despite recent political developments in the US"

Almost 10 years after the onset of the financial crisis, the banking industry still hasn’t completely recovered from the losses it suffered by one measure, BCG said. While finance firms created so-called economic profit of €159 billion ($167 billion) in 2015, a fifth annual increase, the industry remains €9 billion in the red on a cumulative basis for the years 2009 to 2015, the data show. BCG calculated economic profit by taking a bank’s operating results and incorporating its cost of capital.