The year 2020 has been a memorable one in Asia, but for all the wrong reasons. With the lingering US-China trade war knocked out of the headlines by the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic, the region’s banks had enough to deal with without regulators coming to do their checks.
But the regulators did come, and what they found did little to cheer up the sector. Instead, the region’s banks ended up receiving the highest amount of fines issued to date for a multitude of anti-money laundering (AML), combating the financing of terrorism (CFT) and know your customer (KYC) breaches — in some cases dating back several years.