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The launch of the EU’s Anti-Money Laundering Authority, the relentless march of artificial intelligence, boiling geopolitical tensions and a seemingly unstoppable surge in fraud topped the agenda at the latest ACAMS-hosted annual conference in Europe.

After three days rubbing elbows with hundreds of senior compliance officers, attorneys, government officials, regulators, financial crime investigators and other attendees of The Assembly Europe 2025 in Paris, the editorial staff at ACAMS moneylaundering.com sifts through our notes to share some of what we learned with our readers.

Senior regulators from Ireland, Germany and the Netherlands kicked off the conference in earnest Tuesday with a discussion on sweeping anti-financial crime reforms now in full swing in the EU after their adoption last year, with the Anti-Money Laundering Authority, the new, bloc-wide supervisor also known as AMLA, taking centerstage.

The panel emphasized the challenge and importance of rethinking their supervisory approach and building a close relationship with AMLA in the years to come, and how the introduction of a single AML rulebook  in 2027 will impact compliance across the EU.

But they voiced doubts that AMLA could translate its vision of an unprecedentedly risk-based, flexible approach towards compliance and supervision to reality, and concluded that the agency would instead probably saddle financial institutions with new time-consuming tasks and expenditures.

Senior compliance officers shared their skepticism.

“What we’re seeing in … the RTS [regulatory technical standards] is a bit more granular, more prescriptive than we were expecting,” Richard May, head of anti-financial crime for HSBC in Europe, told attendees Wednesday, adding that the bank was still working out how to modify its due-diligence and “core banking systems” to obtain and log more details from clients.

Geopolitical friction and the U.S.-EU divergence on sanctions against Russia and combating illicit finance in general also dominated the conversation in Paris, where a polling question Tuesday showed that most attendees view the Trump administration’s anti-regulatory stance and apparent rollback of anti-financial crime enforcement as “destructive.”

Francois Villeroy de Galhau, governor of Banque de France, took up the refrain Wednesday, labeling the U.S. government’s decision to abandon cases against cryptocurrency platforms accused of AML violations and shelve beneficial-ownership disclosure requirements “a clear step back for transparency and good governance.”

France’s chief central banker then urged financial services companies to adopt “dynamic” transaction-monitoring systems that draw from multiple datasets, and recommended that they make the most of artificial intelligence to fight the epidemic of fraud plaguing Europe.

Compliance officers from Europe’s largest banks voiced little doubt that AI will radically transform institutional efforts to detect and prevent financial crime, but stressed the importance of grasping how their particular version of the technology arrives at decisions, carefully reviewing those outcomes and ensuring they can explain them to examiners.

“AI is a revolution for data management,” said Anne-Catherine Colleau, head of group financial security at BNP Paribas. “The biggest change will be that it will be a holistic view and management of the client relationship,”

As the revolution takes hold, compliance programs will evolve to feature four key roles: technology managers, data managers, risk managers and relationship managers, said Colleau.

Panelists also addressed concerns over AI’s potential to render human involvement in certain compliance-related functions obsolete.

“Actually, what we’re seeing is investigators getting to spend more time on high-quality [transaction-monitoring] alerts, because a lot of the noise [false-positive alerts] is being managed,” Siobhain Ivers, chief compliance officer at Etsy, a U.S.-headquartered, global online marketplace, said Tuesday afternoon.

“There’s lots of opportunity for financial crime professionals to upskill and become more technical,” said Ivers. “You want your financial crime investigators and operations analysts to have access to engineers and data scientists, and learn from them.”

Home turf

The latest chapter of The Assembly Europe also drew dozens of compliance officers, regulators and officials based locally in Paris and elsewhere across France.

Panelists repeatedly stressed the value of financial intelligence in tackling terrorism at the three-day event in the French capital, the site of multiple attacks over the past decade that together have claimed scores of victims.

Brian George, global head of compliance at LBNS Capital Investments, noted Wednesday that because the finances of terrorism often trace back to other, profit-driven crimes, financial institutions must ensure they have robust controls for catching a broad range of illegality, including corruption.

“You can’t have a CTF [counterterrorist financing] strategy without having a proper [anti-] corruption and bribery architecture [because] terrorist financing requires enablers—whether it’s border guards, procurement officers or politicians,” George said. “We have not given as much attention to [this nexus] when we talk about terrorist financing.”

Panelists attributed the prevention of at least three potentially deadly attacks at the Summer Olympics in Paris last year to a combination of France’s financial intelligence unit, also known as Tracfin, and better cooperation between public authorities and private institutions.

“The runup to the Olympic Games allowed us to strengthen those ties and have more in-depth exchanges [of financial intelligence],” Caroline Weill, deputy head of institutional affairs at the French FIU, said Tuesday. “This … enabled us to identify new ways of working together, to be more reactive and agile, and we’ll benefit from those closer ties in the future.”

French prosecutors have also sought to deepen ties with Banque de France’s Prudential Supervision and Resolution Authority, or ACPR, the country’s primary AML supervisor.

“We have a close working relationship with Tracfin, our number one partner, but we also … contact the ACPR [during] investigations,” said Philippe Jaegle, deputy national prosecutor against financial crime. “We [want to know] whether any of the financial institutions we are targeting … have already been inspected.”

Panelists also shed light on new and emerging threats, such as criminal use of AI to bypass know-your-customer screening and the metastasizing scourge of waste trafficking, now a multi-billion-dollar transnational enterprise that demands attention from compliance officers.

Rihards Steins, a senior risk analyst with Latvia’s FIU, told attendees Wednesday that flagging transactions potentially linked to waste trafficking helps reshape the political agenda, making perpetrators of the crime a priority for law enforcement.

“Advocate for environmental crime to be included in your national [money-laundering] risk assessments, and you’ll start seeing additional resources trickling down through institutions in both public and private sectors,” Steins said.

Compliance officers at cryptocurrency platforms meanwhile pored over the details of the EU’s markets in crypto-assets regulation, or MiCA, a comprehensive framework aimed at promoting financial stability, preventing market abuse and safeguarding investors.

Yoann Briant, director of compliance at Coinhouse, an exchange in Paris, noted Tuesday that MiCA’s arrival coincides with the introduction of tougher cybersecurity requirements for virtual asset service providers and the expansion of the “travel rule” to the sector.

“From an operational point of view, I’d say we’re facing something of a regulatory war,” Briant said. “We’re facing a huge challenge in compliance.”

And that’s a wrap.

Safe travels home, and see you in Sydney!

Contact Koos Couvée at kcouvee@acams.org and Gabriel Vedrenne at gvedrenne@acams.org