Banks don’t want you to do anything that reduces their deposits, because they directly lose money when that happens. If you had $1 billion in deposits at a bank

Banks don’t want you to do anything that reduces their deposits, because they directly lose money when that happens. If you had $1 billion in deposits at a bank that was getting 5% returns on investing its deposits, and you wanted to spend that money on buying some securities or something, then that bank would generate approx $1,000,000 in returns for every week that the AML process takes to complete. Due to how fractional banking works, in reality they would be earning some multiple of that return rate, but that’s a bit more abstract and hard to quantify. Because AML processes are completely opaque, often made up on the fly and operate without any due process, banks can and routinely do delay transactions worth multiple billions of dollars for many weeks or longer by asking lots of irrelevant questions, requesting new documents or minor changes, and taking their time in getting back to you about anything, ect... In the world of high value transactions these kafkaesque processes and delays are completely routine.