AMLA’s First Tour of Europe’s Financial Crime Frontline Reveals Cracks in the System

Key Takeaways

• AMLA Finds Uneven AML Readiness Across the EU: The Roadshow revealed major differences in supervisory maturity, enforcement practices, and AML/CFT capabilities between Member States and sectors.
• Technology Is Reshaping Financial Crime Risks: Stakeholders warned that technological innovation is accelerating money laundering and terrorist financing risks while also offering new opportunities for detection and supervision.
• Non-Financial Sectors Remain a Weak Spot: AMLA found that parts of the non-financial sector continue to lag behind financial institutions in AML/CFT awareness, resources, and operational capability.
• Support for EU AML Reform Is Broad: Participants largely welcomed the EU’s new AML/CFT framework and the establishment of AMLA as a way to reduce fragmentation and improve consistency across the bloc.
• Expectations for AMLA Are Already High: Stakeholders across Europe are looking to AMLA for clearer guidance, stronger coordination, shared tools, and a more harmonized supervisory environment.

Deep Dive

Over the course of 2025, Anti-Money Laundering Authority Chair Bruna Szego traveled across all 27 European Union Member States, meeting directly with the supervisors, financial intelligence units, banks, insurers, crypto firms, accountants, lawyers, and other stakeholders tasked with defending Europe’s financial system from illicit finance.

Now, the authority known as AMLA has published the findings from that sweeping tour, offering one of the clearest snapshots yet of how Europe’s anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing framework is functioning at ground level and where officials believe it is falling short.

The report documents AMLA’s first systematic engagement exercise since the agency formally began operations in 2025. Far from presenting a tidy portrait of a unified European system, the findings instead reveal a landscape marked by uneven preparedness, widening technological pressures, and mounting expectations surrounding the EU’s ambitious new anti-financial crime architecture.

At the center of the report is a recurring theme that surfaced in nearly every country visited: financial crime risks are evolving faster than many institutions and supervisory structures were designed to handle.

According to AMLA, participants consistently pointed to a rapidly shifting money laundering and terrorist financing landscape shaped by technological innovation, geopolitical instability, and increasingly sophisticated cross-border criminal activity. Traditional typologies have not disappeared, the report notes, but they are increasingly being accompanied by newer, faster-moving threats that can spread across jurisdictions with alarming speed.

Those concerns were not distributed evenly across the bloc.

The Roadshow findings describe a European AML/CFT ecosystem operating from materially different starting points depending on geography, sector, and supervisory maturity. While some Member States were viewed as relatively advanced in their supervisory capabilities and analytical tools, others were described as facing fragmented oversight structures, resource limitations, and inconsistent enforcement practices.

Particularly striking was the repeated concern that parts of the non-financial sector continue to trail behind banks and other financial institutions in AML/CFT awareness and operational capability. Stakeholders warned that those gaps could create vulnerabilities capable of being exploited by criminal networks operating across borders.

Technology also emerged throughout the report as both a destabilizing force and a potential lifeline. On one hand, stakeholders described technological change as accelerating criminal typologies and shrinking the window for detecting suspicious activity. On the other, many participants argued that advanced analytics, interoperable systems, and shared supervisory tools could significantly improve both detection capabilities and operational efficiency if implemented effectively at the EU level.

Created to help address long-standing fragmentation in Europe’s previous directive-based AML regime, AMLA is expected to play a central role in implementing the EU’s new Single Rulebook and promoting greater supervisory convergence across Member States. The authority will also directly supervise a limited number of major cross-border financial institutions.

The Roadshow suggests many across Europe see the reforms as overdue. Stakeholders broadly welcomed the move toward a more harmonized framework, particularly the possibility of reducing inconsistent reporting obligations, overlapping information requests, and divergent supervisory expectations that have long complicated compliance efforts for cross-border organizations.

But the report also makes clear that the enthusiasm surrounding AMLA comes with substantial pressure. Participants across the bloc called on the authority to provide clearer guidance on emerging risks, simplify rules, strengthen cooperation mechanisms, and develop common tools that could improve supervisory coordination. Expectations were often highly specific and, in some cases, expansive.

AMLA itself appeared keenly aware of the risk of overpromising.

The authority cautioned in the report that many suggestions raised during the Roadshow would require amendments to EU legislation and therefore fall outside AMLA’s formal mandate. It also acknowledged that expectations surrounding the rapid rollout of IT infrastructure and common systems exceed what can realistically be delivered in the short term while the agency continues building its core operational capabilities.

Still, the tone of the report is less defensive than pragmatic.

Rather than framing the Roadshow as a completed exercise, AMLA positioned it as the beginning of a longer process aimed at building a more coherent and operationally grounded European AML/CFT framework. The authority said the Roadshow will continue in recurring cycles across all Member States and will serve as an ongoing reference point for engagement with supervisors, FIUs, and private sector stakeholders.

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