AML Investigations: Why the Money Trail Exists And Why Most Institutions Can’t Follow It

AML compliance costs banks and financial institutions over $60 billion annually worldwide, yet the financial crime it is designed to stop continues largely unimpeded. The money moves. The networks operate. The compliance machinery hums. And the gap between what the system costs and what it actually stops remains, by any measure, enormous.

In India, the picture is equally stark. Over 5,000 cases were registered under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act in the last decade, but only 40 convictions were made; source: The Hindu. And India’s FATF 2024 Mutual Evaluation flagged a critical structural bottleneck: a “large backlog of pending cases” that severely hampers AML prosecutions, with the report noting that “prosecutions and convictions have started to increase, but the backlog of pending cases remains considerable.”