Following a definition of Money Laundering and its consequences on various fronts as well as an overview of the relevant legislation and obligations of the Financial Institutions, this study undertakes an empirical research among Greek Bank employees. The purpose of this investigation is to asses the level of preparedness and understanding of the rules and obligations of bank employees and the effectiveness of the organizations in achieving the goal of preventing and reporting incidents of money laundering and the financing of illegal activities.
For this purpose, a questionnaire of 38 closed type questions was prepared and distributed to a random sample of bank employees over a one month period in 2015 by use of internet. The responses (129 valid responses) were recorded on a internet application, ensuring anonymity. The data collected were analyzed with excel and were then compared to the results of a similar study conducted in 2007 and published in 2008. The overall level of knowledge of the respondents was satisfactory at 75%. The differentiations in the degree of knowledge is then examined by various demographic characteristics of our sample such as age, position in the Bank, years in the Bank, days of seminars attended. The results are as expected, with the employees who have recently attended relevant seminars performing better that the others. On the other hand, even those respondents that never attended a seminar answered correctly 58% of the relevant questions. The level of academic degrees of the respondents did not have a positive effect on their performance.
In addition, the respondents offered their opinions on methods and practices that could improve the prevention of money laundering in banking institutions.
Finally, the empirical results are compared to a similar study conducted 8 years ago. We observe that while the degree of knowledge of bank employees and other parameters of the study are very similar, the frequency and intensity of education of the bank employees has increased.