Throughout the last ten years, financial institutions have ridden the highs, and plunged to the lows of the economic cycle. Despite these dramatic changes in the business environment, Anti-Money Laundering (AML) has remained a key focus area.

In fact, AML has never been higher on senior management’s agenda, with regulatory fines now running into billions of dollars, regulatory action becoming genuinely license threatening, and threats of criminal prosecution against banks and individuals.

Financial institutions are making significant changes in response to regulatory action and increasingly far-reaching global AML regulations, changing the AML scene from a standalone function under compliance, to an increasingly complex and overarching function cutting across legal, risk, operations and tax. Strong AML processes and controls are at the heart of interdependencies and linkages with a global organization.

The Global Anti-Money Laundering Survey 2014 explores the ways in which organizations are preventing, detecting, and responding to AML compliance risks. The survey was deployed in November 2013 and distributed to AML and compliance professionals in the top 1,000 global banks in 48 countries, garnering responses from 317 participants.