Actually given the size of these institutions I find the amounts fined staggeringly low. None of these institutions is remotely in danger of losing even one year's profits because of this.

That's how you should judge this. The "highest fine ever" is $700M on a profit of $13400M (after tax) according to their financial report. Or something like $2k for someone making $100k yearly (again calculated as 4% on after tax).

None of these institutions are in any danger of serious consequences. This is a "1% less hookers at the christmas party" punishment.

Have you worked at a big company, let alone a big bank?

When you have 100k+ employees, it's immensely difficult to keep tabs on every. single. thing. that's happening.

If a bank sees asset flows into the trillions, even $1bn of tainted transactions is less than 0.1%.

Do you or 'those in power' know 99.9% of what happens at your company?

> When you have 100k+ employees, it's immensely difficult to keep tabs on every. single. thing. that's happening.

Tough. You want the big bucks? You gotta solve hard problems. Big companies shouldn't be able to whine or excuse their way out of problems because those problems are hard. If they're too hard to solve, pull an HP and split your company into lots of smaller companies.

Those in power over a business with a trillion dollar asset flow don’t have to know everything personally: they can afford to hire a robust auditing department to make sure they’re in compliance with the law, just as they don’t personally handle every new hire or procurement. That also helps in court: if J. Rogue Banker’s story ends when the company learns of it and immediately alerts the authorities, it’s a lot less likely that the bank is going to get hit with penalties due to the clear lack of organizational approval.

The places which don’t have good auditing teams are gambling that they won’t be fined more than the cost of having one, which is easy to fix.

I'm told that given enough data and fine-grained recording of money flows, AI will "save the day".

Always make sure you have plausible deniability.