On 10 August 2026, the US Department of the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) convened law enforcement agencies and financial institutions in San Francisco for an information-sharing engagement on cartel activity. The session was led by Gene Lange, performing the duties of the Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, alongside FinCEN Deputy Director Jimmy Kirby, and covered case studies, typologies and suspicious activity associated wit

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has published a Financial Trend Analysis showing that financial institutions identified close to $5 billion in transactions linked to suspected human smuggling over a three-year period. The analysis, released on 13 August 2026, draws on 67,540 Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) reports filed between 2023 and 2025, and sets out a typology set that maps closely onto exposures already sitting in UK remittance and correspondent portfolios. Th

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a bureau of the US Department of the Treasury, issued a final rule on 11 August 2026 that permanently removes the requirement for US companies and US persons to report beneficial ownership information under the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA). The rule became effective on 14 August 2026. It carries the regulatory identification number RIN 1506-AB67 and runs to 73 pages. The final rule adopts the exemptions set out in the int

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has published its final rules on the UK transaction reporting regime, confirming a package of changes it estimates will reduce the annual cost to industry from approximately £493m to £385m — a net saving of £108m. The rules take effect on 3 April 2028, with a flexible supervisory approach permitting firms that are ready to implement certain elements ahead of that date. The reforms narrow the reportable perimeter in four material respects.

The European Supervisory Authorities — the European Banking Authority (EBA), the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA) and the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), collectively the ESAs — published a joint statement on 31 July 2026 calling for a cross-sectoral, risk-based and consistent supervisory approach to the information and communication technology (ICT) risks arising from frontier artificial intelligence (AI) models. The statement

The Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) has confirmed two specific directions requiring Mastercard and Visa to change how they charge and account for card scheme and processing fees in the United Kingdom, closing out the substantive remedies phase of its market review into those fees. The directions address findings that acquirers have struggled to understand what they are being billed, why, and on what basis. Under the information, transparency and complexity remedy, the schemes

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) issued an alert on 24 July 2026 urging financial institutions to detect, prevent and report suspicious activity linked to organised fraud against student aid programmes administered by the US Federal government. The alert, FIN-2026-Alert004, sets out two principal typologies and a set of transactional indicators drawn from Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) reporting. The first typology concerns so-called "ghost students". Fraud rings obt

Andrea Gacki, Director of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), used written testimony before the US House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services on 21 July 2026 to set out two priorities that will resonate with UK compliance practitioners: disrupting the fraud that generates the largest share of illicit proceeds, and rebuilding the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) framework around effectiveness rather than technical compliance. On fraud, FinCEN pointed to meas

Europe's financial regulators have signalled that AI-driven cyber threats now warrant supervisory attention in their own right. On 7 July 2026, the European Supervisory Authorities (ESAs) — the European Banking Authority (EBA), the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA) and the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) — publicly backed a warning from the European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB) that frontier AI models pose systemic cyber risks to th

The Payments Vision Delivery Committee (PVDC) has published a policy paper clarifying how the United Kingdom's next-generation retail payments infrastructure should accommodate financial crime controls, providing supporting context to the design consultation opened by the Retail Payments Infrastructure Board (RPIB) on 25 June 2026. The RPIB consultation, chaired by the Bank of England, addresses the core clearing and messaging layer that will eventually replace the rails unde

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has published the final tranche of its cryptoasset rulebook, completing the regulatory roadmap that will govern trading platforms, custodians, intermediaries, stablecoin issuers and staking arrangers operating in the United Kingdom. The framework crystallises the perimeter established when legislation brought cryptoassets within the FCA's remit in February 2026, and sets a hard commencement date of 25 October 2027 for the mandatory author

The European Banking Authority (EBA) has published a Consultation Paper setting out a draft methodology for the calculation of fines under its supervisory mandate for the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA). The stated objective is to ensure that penalties imposed on issuers of significant crypto-assets are consistent, proportionate and transparent. Under MiCA, the EBA assumes direct supervisory responsibility where an asset-referenced token (ART), or an e-money token