Singapore’s tightened compliance measures and enforcement actions have brought steady increases in fines from a total value of US$748,693 in 2021 to $818,329 in 2022 (up by 9.3%), and to $2,681,162 in 2023 (a whopping 228% increase).
Last year, the trend continued with regulatory fine values increasing 22% to $3,281,066, the report by Fenergo, a global provider of digital solutions for client lifecycle management (CLM), know your customer (KYC) and transaction monitoring (TM), found.
Apart from greater regulatory scrutiny of Singapore’s financial institutions, this significant increase has also been influenced by factors such as “increased technology adoption by regulatory bodies and subsequent efficiency gains,” said the report.
Fines were predominantly in relation to AML/ KYC and TM breaches in 2024 with values of $1.84m and $1.43m respectively.
TM violations also dominated the global landscape in 2024 with a total of $3.3bn in fines issued. This was followed by KYC fines ($105m) and AML $1.19bn, with ESG as an emerging area with a value of $37.69m.
Rory Doyle, head of financial crime policy at Fenergo, predicts that the Singapore market can expect more investigations and enforcement action in 2025.
“Learning from the financial scandals in late 2023, and with the formation of private-public partnerships such as Cosmic Singapore regulators and finance intelligence units now have access to more data. This allows them to identify issues more efficiently, and act more quickly in cracking down or mitigating breaches from occurring,” he said.
Moreover, as China tightens control over financial activity, particularly with its new regulatory framework for crypto, there will be a potential outflow of funds to other economies such as Singapore.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore “has historically been very cautious and fair with their penalties, but as the year-on-year increase in fines indicates, they will be sounding a clarion call to the market by issuing more punitive fines in 2025,” said Doyle.
Indeed, Fenergo foresees a “surge in enforcement action in Singapore” across all financial services sectors. Hence, it is in the best interest of financial institutions to deploy robust infrastructures for AML thus streamlining processes for KYC, suspicious activity reporting and transaction monitoring.
