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The EU’s new super-supervisor is coming to life, but will it enable or restrict the future of the EU’s financial services industry?

While the new European financial crime watchdog, the Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA), is slowly settling in Frankfurt, the EU faces rising internal and external security threats, all of which have a financial dimension. From Russian sabotage and sanctions circumvention to terrorism and organised crime, our security increasingly depends on our ability to tackle illicit finance. But is the EU’s response to money moved outside the law, or within it but with harmful intent, fit for purpose? Or are its structures and responses still rooted in the challenges of the past?

In the 2010s, Europe was rocked by a series of financial crime scandals, with Danske Bank the most prominent example of the impact of weaknesses in anti-money laundering responses across the EU. Back then, the existing anti-money laundering directive covering the European and national level anti-financial crime frameworks – or its implementation – appeared to fail to secure the integrity of the European financial system. In response, Brussels bureaucrats undertook a lengthy exercise to design a response that would strengthen defences. Fast forward a couple of years to July 2021, and the European Commission introduced its proposed Anti-Money Laundering Package (AMLP) to improve, modernise and advance the bloc's response to illicit finance. At that time, the suite of measures was framed as ‘ambitious’ by policymakers and commentators alike, promising to ‘improve the detection of suspicious transactions and activities and to close loopholes used by criminals to launder illicit proceeds or finance terrorist activities through the financial system’.

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