The value of regulatory fines issued to financial institutions globally in H1 2025 more than quadrupled compared to the same period last year, with digital assets firms increasingly in the crosshairs, reveals Fenergo, a KYC, transaction monitoring, and CLM solution provider.
According to half-year annual findings on global financial institution enforcement actions, Fenergo reveals that regulators levied around 139 financial penalties, according to publicly available data, in the first half of 2025, totalling $1.23billion – a 417 per cent increase on the same period in 2024, where a total of 118 fines were issued worth $238.6million. The fines relate to anti-money laundering (AML), know your customer (KYC), sanctions, suspicious activity reports (SARs), and transaction monitoring violations.
The findings – which relate to enforcement actions spanning EMEA, North America and Asia Pacific from January 2025 to June 2025 – continue a multi-year trend of increasing fines, as watchdogs continue a global crackdown on illicit behaviour.
The most significant penalty was issued by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) to cryptocurrency exchange OKX, which paid more than $504million after it pled guilty to failing to maintain an effective AML program in February. Another cryptocurrency exchange, BitMEX, was also fined more than $100million by the DOJ for similar AML failings, highlighting the continued push from American authorities to hold digital assets institutions to account.
Penalties imposed by North American regulators saw the largest increase in terms of value, totalling over $1.06billion – a 565 per cent surge on the same period in 2024. EMEA also experienced an uptick of penalties with watchdogs issuing $168.2million worth of fines, up 147 per cent from $68million. Meanwhile, the value of penalties issued by regulators in APAC fell. Authorities in APAC issued a total of $3.4million of penalties in H1 this year, down considerably from $10.7million in H1 2024.
Time to leverage AI?
While fines related to AML represent the greatest share of penalties this year, there has been a marked increase in the value of those related to sanctions failures specifically. Approximately $3.7million worth of fines were issued in H1 2024 for sanctions monitoring failures, while $228.8 million worth of penalties were doled out for sanctions compliance breaches in H1 this year.
Commenting on the findings, Rory Doyle, head of financial crime policy at Fenergo, said: “These figures offer a stark warning to financial institutions across the globe – particularly those operating in the fast-growing digital assets sector, where watchdogs won’t hesitate to dole out hefty fines for AML shortcomings. The findings also reflect a global trend of increased regulatory scrutiny around sanctions compliance, as geopolitical tensions and evolving sanctions regimes place greater pressure on firms to bolster their systems and processes.
“The importance of integrating smarter financial crime technology with AI to increase accuracy and strengthen due diligence processes cannot be overstated in this context – especially as firms continue to grapple with more complex markets and a shortage of skilled financial crime professionals.”
