Britain’s battle against illegal money is struggling because the systems to fight it are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of suspicious transactions, MPs have been warned.

Banks, academics and campaigners have responded to a parliamentary ­investigation into money laundering arguing that the system is also too ­fragmented to effectively clamp down on criminals. The UK Financial ­Intelligence Unit received 634,113 ­suspicious activity ­reports from ­October 2015 to March 2017, which is too many to handle, HSBC said.

“The current regime is not well placed to draw out the most pertinent risks from this data or to identity emerging trends to help drive shared strategic prioritisation of threats between the public and private sectors,” the bank told MPs.