COMPANY boards and senior managers worldwide, in the past decade, were paying increased attention to measures against money laundering, professional services group KPMG said on Tuesday.

The South African Reserve Bank has initiated awareness programmes, and earlier this year fined the country’s four major banks R125m collectively because of their lax control of money laundering.

In the US, JPMorgan Chase has been fined $2bn for violating the Bank Secrecy Act.

KPMG’s latest survey on curbing money laundering showed 88% of senior managers felt it was a priority. Only 61% felt the same when KPMG conducted its first survey on the subject, in 2004.

It conducted similar surveys in 2009 and 2011.

The latest survey, which was published on Tuesday, was done in 48 countries and involved the participation of 317 heads of anti-money-laundering divisions, directors and senior managers at the world’s largest banks.

One of its main findings was that 84% of senior managers felt the pace and effect of the regulatory burden were posing "significant challenges" to their operations.

In some jurisdictions, the prospect of people being criminally prosecuted had become a reality.

KPMG said many people in management believed that it was no longer possible to meet all of the regulatory expectations.

In Africa, 92% of the managers felt that money laundering posed a high risk in their own businesses, compared to 84% of all the respondents holding this view.

KPMG said regions that had many developing countries, such as Africa, the Middle East, and South America, needed to take a more active approach to reduce their vulnerability to financial crimes.

In South Africa, the Financial Intelligence Centre Act (Fica) was introduced in 2002, with the intention of preventing organised crime syndicates from benefiting from illegitimate profits through money laundering, and protecting the integrity of the South African financial sector.

In terms of Fica, the Reserve Bank has the task of supervising and enforcing compliance with Fica rules, to ensure that banks have controls to deal with money laundering and combat financing of terrorism.

In the case of the South African banks being fined for their lack of controls, the Reserve Bank emphasised that the fines did not mean that the big four banks — Standard Bank, Absa, First National Bank and Nedbank — had facilitated transactions involving money laundering and the financing of terrorism.

In the survey, respondents said the "know your customer" rule remained an area of concern, with 70% of them saying they had been subjected to a "regulatory visit".

The survey also found that the cost of compliance had increased sharply and was expected to continue to rise.

The survey participants felt the costs would increase at an average rate of 53% a year for banking institutions, exceeding the previous prediction of more than 40% a year three years ago.

Managers said they spent the most on compliance costs related to the transaction monitoring systems that had been developed internally or externally.