Banks around the world have racked up a staggering £190 billion in fines, settlement fees and provisions in the six years since 2009, and the industry has set aside £146bn to pay for further fines.

But as sanctions continue to rain down on the sector, is there any sign that fines actually hurt the banks or, more importantly, cause them to change their behaviour?

The most recent penalties to be handed down saw six banks, including the bailed-out Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), and HSBC, fined £2.6bn - a record £1.1bn from the UK regulator and the rest from two US regulators - for rigging the £3.5 trillion-a-day foreign exchange market. Also this month, RBS was fined £42 million for a computer meltdown in 2012, which left customers unable to access the money in their accounts.

These most recent sanctions follow massive fines imposed on the sector in 2013 for rigging the benchmark Libor inter-bank interest rate. This included fines totalling £290m for Barclays, imposed by regulators in the US and UK, and £218m in fines for Lloyds.

Other sanctions imposed on the sector have been for offences related to the US subprime lending crisis, sanction-busting, money-laundering, electricity market manipulation, gold price fixing and ­assisting tax evasion.

Although no fines have been imposed on UK banks in connection with the country's biggest and costliest mis-selling scandal (of payment protection insurance) Britain's banks have so far had to pay out more than £23bn in compensation to customers and have set aside billions more to deal with future claims.

But in the week that a study from the New City Agenda think tank and Cass Business School in London concluded that it will take a generation to change the "toxic" and "aggressive" culture of British banks, there is scant evidence that the punishment being handed down to institutions for their malfeasance (£38.5bn in fines and customer redress over the last 15 years) is encouraging them to change the way they do business.

According to former Metropolitan Police fraud squad detective Rowan Bosworth-Davies, the pain of fines is mostly felt by bank shareholders (which in the case of RBS means British taxpayers) and not by the executives responsible for masterminding and perpetrating the misdemeanours.

He said: "Under the current system, the shareholders get penalised while the bankers walk away scot-free."

Bosworth-Davies believes that a more dynamic, American-style regulatory regime is needed in the UK and that there is little evidence that the division in April 2013 of the Financial Services Authority watchdog into the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) has improved the quality of regulation of the UK's financial sector.

"It is just a change of name," he said. "They didn't change the people they employ; the same people are still there."

Bosworth-Davies welcomes the fact that the Serious Fraud Office - which, unlike the FCA and the PRA has the power to institute criminal proceedings - is currently investigating some bank employees for their role in the recent forex scandal. But the likelihood is that, while some relatively low-level traders might end up in prison, the board members of the banks will remain untouched.

"Prosecutors have got to be prepared to go after the board in order to make a difference," Bosworth-Davies said. "The messages are being sent out, but it is very difficult because bankers have long believed themselves to be above the law."

Financial journalist and blogger Ian Fraser - a Sunday Herald contributor whose book Shredded, detailing the RBS scandal, was longlisted for the FT financial book of the year award - said: "Given the scale of most banks' profits compared to these deals, it is little surprise that banks see such out-of-court settlements rather like parking or speeding tickets: mildly inconvenient, a public relations blip. They don't encourage much soul-searching and seem to have zero effect on behaviour."

Fraser said that separating the functions of the City's financial watchdog in two was, in principal, a good idea as there had been a conflict between policing conduct and financial stability. For example, the imposition of large fines on banks for misconduct could - as Bank of England deputy governor Andrew Bailey and credit ratings agency Fitch have both recently warned - decrease a bank's financial stability if banks have to dig deep to pay penalties rather than using the cash to build up sufficient capital cushions.

The possibility of massive US-type fines negatively affecting financial institutions led Owen Kelly, chief executive of Scottish Financial Enterprise, the trade body of Scotland's financial services industries, to warn that the levying of disproportionate fines could ultimately affect bank customers.

He said: "There are good signs that the problems of the past are being addressed and the industry is rebuilding itself to ensure bad practices do not return.

"Penalties, however, should be approached with balance as the scale of fines could, in the long-term, drive up costs which in turn is bad for customers. More importantly, it is about creating a culture of doing the right thing as organisations and individuals and providing the best services to customers."

Other powerful voices calling for fundamental cultural change in the banking sector include Bank of England governor Mark Carney, who told a meeting of the International Monetary Fund last month that top bank executives had so far "got away without sanction". Following the financial crisis, he said, "maybe they were not at the best tables in society after that, but they're still at the best golf courses. That has got to change."

Meanwhile, Lord Myners - City minister in Gordon Brown's government who worked on the 2008 bank rescue package - has said that fining the industry is not working and that top executives should be forced to accept responsibility when things go wrong.

He said: "The only thing which will affect behaviour will be an absolute insistence from the top of the banks that behaviour must be exemplary and a zero tolerance of anything which falls short."

So far this year, the FCA has slapped financial firms with nearly £1.5bn of penalties - more than three times the record level of fines it levied in 2013 which amounted to £474.3m (see table). This compares with the US, where financial institutions have so far this year been hit with $56.6bn in penalties, well above last year's record total of $52bn.

Rule changes imposed by Chancellor George Osborne in the wake of the Libor-rigging crisis mean that fines imposed by the FCA are now funnelled into the Treasury's coffers rather than going to the regulator, as they did in the past.

In July this year, £20m of this windfall was set aside by the Government to partly fund specialist accommodation for military veterans. The sheer size of the fines imposed in recent months has also led to a call from shadow chancellor Ed Balls for £1bn to be given to the NHS.

The FCA's head of enforcement and financial crime, Tracey McDermott, told the Sunday Herald that the authority's main aim in imposing fines was to drive up standards.

"The job of enforcement is to help the FCA change behaviour by making it clear that there are real and meaningful consequences for those firms or individuals who don't play by the rules," she said. "We seek to use the approach which we believe will be most effective in driving up standards, and fines are part of our wider effect to clean up the City."

But in the case of banks which are partially or mostly owned by the state, does the imposition of financial sanctions make much difference? In the case of RBS, which is 80% owned by the state, it could be argued that the net effect of fining it is that millions of pounds are simply transferred from the balance sheet of one state organisation (the bank) to another (the Treasury).

The direct hit of a fine on a bank's bottom line also means that imposing a fine on RBS or Lloyds (which is currently 25% state-owned) has the unintended consequence that those banks are likely to be returned to the private sector later rather than sooner. And yet the full return of both banks to the private sector is a key Government objective.

A spokeswoman for RBS said that ­financial penalties imposed on the bank have had a direct effect on employees as well as on the bank's balance sheet.

Last year, the bank cut staff remuneration by £302m by reducing the bank's bonus pool, clawing back previous bonuses and slashing future pay. In the same year, RBS made losses of £8.2bn, almost half of which (£3.8bn) was because of regulatory fines and redress provisions.

The spokeswoman said: "A lot of the fines have been for things that have happened in the past and we have tried to be open and transparent about the things that happened.

"There is now a clear direction of travel towards reform. That process started with previous chief executive Stephen Hester and has continued since Ross McEwan took over in October 2013."

Earlier this month McEwan expressed his anger about the cavalier and cynical online chatroom messages of foreign exchange dealers.

"As an organisation we do want to hold people accountable for good behaviour and rewards - and bad behaviour," McEwan said. "We will be clawing back and taking disciplinary proceedings where wrongdoing has been done."

More than 50 present and former staff at RBS are currently being investigated over the forex scandal, six are facing disciplinary proceedings and three have already been suspended.

Of the 21 RBS wrongdoers identified as having been seriously involved in the Libor racket, six were dismissed from the bank and the others have been the subject of disciplinary action. The RBS spokeswoman added that the bank had also clawed back £70m in bonuses from around 3000 people, mostly because of the Libor scandal.

In answer to the calls for bank employees to be made individually responsible for their actions, one of the justifications that has been invoked by banks is the so-called "Murder On The Orient Express defence" - where everyone was collectively to blame, and therefore no-one was effectively culpable.

Recent comments made by the chief executives of both RBS and Barclays appear - perhaps for the first time - to show contrition for the events of the past few years and a commitment to implement fundamental reform of the retail and investment banking sectors. That is to be welcomed, as are new laws which mean that bankers found guilty of "reckless conduct" could face jail.

But real change is unlikely to happen until regulators and prosecutors focus their attention on targeting individuals, rather than banks collectively. Until then the eye-watering amounts imposed on banks and their public backers are not especially meaningful - it is only this shift from the general to the particular that seems likely to effect a real change.