‘INTERNATIONAL Anti-Financial Crime Summit 2026’ promised a glittering line-up of leaders, and London delivered. Speeches, panels and coffee breaks were all devoted to the profession’s next frontiers and to how technology is reshaping the fight against financial crime.
Schuman was there, gliding and mingling with delegates and occasionally sipping a delightful espresso martini.
Back in the comfort of home, they compiled eight takeaways from this year’s Davos of financial crime:
1. Fraud is front and centre for the profession
It’s no surprise given how many people fall victim to scammers, but fraud stole the summit’s spotlight once again. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has made tackling it a top priority, estimating its cost to the global economy at around $500 billion.
FATF President Giles Thomson opened the conference by pointing to the massive scale of scams and the deep harm they cause. He warned that fraud is not merely growing but evolving thanks to technology.
“We are witnessing the emergence of highly organised criminal ecosystems operating across multiple jurisdictions,” he said. “Criminal groups can now operate globally, targeting thousands of victims simultaneously and moving proceeds across borders in minutes.”
Hennie Verbeek-Kusters, executive board member at the EU’s Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA), said fraud is often the predicate offence for money laundering. Fighting scams is not in AMLA’s mandate, but the agency will play its part through supervision and through joint analysis by financial intelligence units (FIUs) to uncover patterns and the money laundering linked to them, she said.
2. 2027 is just the start for AMLA
Verbeek-Kusters put it in black and white for anyone who still thought July 10, 2027 was the end of the road for aligning rules and practices in the EU: it is not.
“10 July 2027 is an important date. It is a major milestone, and it is understandable that many people focus on that date. But it is very important to understand that a milestone is not a finish line. And a finish line in AMLA’s context is not where the work ends. It is where you set new and more ambitious goals,” she said.
The agency is under pressure to deliver the remaining parts of the rulebook as the date the new EU framework starts to apply draws near. But Verbeek-Kusters shifted the focus to what the date represents: the moment the lights go up and the system must start proving that it works.
Other regulators at the conference chimed in that the timing is becoming an issue and not everything can be done and dusted by then. Sebastiano Laviola, head of AML supervision at the Bank of Italy, said an adjustment period might be needed so that companies have enough time to adapt.
3. Focus on the problem you want to solve
The “risk-based approach”, supervisors’ lingo for focusing resources where the risk is highest, is every regulator’s mantra. But will it be possible to lure them away from the comfort of box-ticking? Box-ticking is clearly safer, but it would not work in the EU, where a bank faces the same rules as a notary but has about 100 more compliance staff.
The new rulebook represents a “huge challenge” because no one yet knows how the rules will be applied, said Tony Cahalan, head of financial integrity at the Central Bank of Ireland.
“How proportionate is AMLA going to be? How reasonable is AMLA going to be, and by extension the national supervisor?” he asked.
The omens are not great on that front. Tommas Kaplan, CEO of Turn Advisory, noted that with just three regulatory technical standards (RTSs) the agency has already added more than 100 articles to an already prescriptive legal text.
Cahalan said regulators should focus on the problem they want to solve rather than on the rules. “Financial crime prevention should not be about an audit-style approach where you’re just trying to minimise regulatory risk,” he said. “We should be looking at it in more of a partnership-type approach: what is the problem we’re trying to solve, and how are we going to solve it?”
4. The worst is yet to come for AI crimes
If you haven’t yet, it’s time to build your (compliance) army of AI agents, said former Israel FIU chief Shlomit Wagman.
Technology is making everything easier and faster for consumers and criminals alike, so authorities and private-sector compliance officers need to move from retrospective investigation to real-time prevention and intervention to keep up. But hopes that this will happen are dimming, the former official said.
“Criminals are acting in the speed of technology, and regulators and law enforcement in the speed of law,” she quipped during a panel discussion. “And adding to that one sentence that financial institutions are operating at the speed of policy and technology, and here we see a major gap.”
Wagman said financial institutions lag far behind criminal networks in adopting new technology, and things are likely to get worse.
“We’re going to see much more criminal activity using AI, and, if we’re not prepared, the infrastructure will not be able to respond properly,” she said.
5. Public-private partnerships are the way to go
Cahalan said it first and many after him agreed: fighting financial crime takes a shared effort between private and public institutions.
Thomson said the FATF aims to make actionable public-private partnerships (PPPs) a requirement for all its members, putting pressure on jurisdictions such as the EU, where there is still little clarity on what information can be shared.
AMLA aims to deliver guidance on what institutions can share in these forums, but not before 2027, as the agency first needs to finish its regulatory framework.
Anu Ratan, EMEA head of reg change and global programmes at BNY, went a step further and said regulators should engage more with the private sector in policy working groups when developing public policies.
6. Information sharing foiled Lady Gaga concert terror plot
Kodex CEO Matt Donahue gave a striking example of what information sharing between the public and private sectors can achieve.
“I don’t know if there are any fellow little monsters out there,” Donahue said, referring to the nickname of the pop star’s fans. “But there was a Lady Gaga concert in Brazil, and essentially a domestic terrorist cell was foiled from bombing the concert last May.”
He explained that Brazilian authorities used information that a platform shared through Kodex to make sure they were tracking down the right person.
But information sharing and other types of public-private partnership have one big enemy: public procurement. Many officials, including former IRS chief Guy Ficco and HM Treasury official Kevin Nxxxxxx, were unanimous that procurement is the biggest barrier to partnerships in the public sector, and that it needs dealing with urgently.
7. Gossip: the upcoming US FATF review
There was no mention on stage of the upcoming FATF review of the US, but in the breaks some delegates privately aired their puzzlement.
As part of President Donald Trump’s deregulation push, the Treasury has watered down many of its anti-financial crime safeguards. It scrapped beneficial ownership reporting requirements for American companies and has not yet implemented a crypto-specific travel rule.
These are two key standards required by the FATF, which will soon assess the US. Among anti-financial crime professionals there was hope that the review could halt or reverse the deregulatory spiral the country has fallen into. But some said the US government has already factored in that it will not pass the review with flying colours.
There were also questions about how tough the international standard setter could be, given the Trump administration’s propensity to leave international organisations it dislikes. And while the summit took place in London, AMLA Chair Bruna Szego travelled to the US with a delegation to get first-hand knowledge of her US counterparts’ intentions.
8. “Be blunt” when defending women’s rights
The summit also named a new leadership council for the Women in FinCrime network. Beth Harris, head of financial crime at the UK Financial Conduct Authority, was named chair, while the Bank of France’s Jordane Salducci became vice-chair.
At a breakfast meeting of the network, Harris had some advice for those in attendance: you’ve got to be blunt about imbalances between men and women in sharing childcare.
She called on women to “call things out like that” and be “a bit more blunt [about the fact] that just because we birthed them doesn’t mean you have to have them 100% of the time”.
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