EXCLUSIVE: "No Place to Hide" - Simonas Krėpšta, AMLA in 'The Fintech Magazine'

Can the EU’s new Anti-Money Laundering Authority bring harmony to the fragmented fight against fincrime?

According to Napier AI’s 2025/26 AML Index, money laundering is thought to have drained a whopping $5.5trillion from the legitimate world economy, representing five per cent of global GDP. That’s an increase over the previous year of an amount roughly equivalent to the whole economic output of Greece.

 A vanishingly small proportion of these illicit profits from serious crime, trafficking and terrorism is ever seen again. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates that agencies globally seize, freeze or recover as little as 0.2 per cent of it. That said, in the UK, there’s a glimmer of hope. The Home Office’s asset recovery statistics show £284.5million was subject to confiscation, forfeiture and civil recovery orders in the financial year ending March 2025, which is a 15 per cent improvement on the previous 12 months. Imagine the misery that could be prevented if that effort was scaled up across Europe.

That is the challenge the European Union’s Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA) has been created to address. Established under the EU’s 2024 anti-money laundering package and due to come fully online in 2028, AMLA has three mandates: to build a single rulebook through Level 2 and Level 3 technical standards for all 27 countries in the bloc; to supervise the 40 highest-risk ‘obliged entities’ – those organisations legally required to apply anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorist financing (CFT) rules, including complex cross-border credit and financial institutions, and crypto-asset service providers; and to coordinate national financial intelligence units. AMLA isn’t a toothless tiger. It can impose fines of up to €10million or 10 per cent of turnover and/or periodic penalty payments, demand evidence, and order unannounced inspections. But its first task will be to introduce a degree of harmony.

“There are still some [policy] areas in Europe where we have 27 different sets of rules, and money laundering is one of them,” says Simonas Krėpšta, Executive Board Member at AMLA. “In the long term, we really want to create a comprehensive single system for money laundering prevention, able to fight financial crime effectively but also set the scene for competitiveness and business growth across Europe.”

Krėpšta identifies two forces driving financial crime, and neither is decelerating. The first is technology.

“Criminals are using it at scale,” he says. “Fincrime is an industrial business; it’s fully digitalised, it’s cross-border, and we see the trends are growing.”
Financial fraud, he notes, is now among the largest predicate offences in Europe by value stolen. The second factor fanning the AML flames is geopolitics. Sanctions regimes covering Russia, North Korea, Iran and others create a powerful commercial motivation to evade them, and stablecoins and other instruments are being used to do exactly that.

Krėpšta accepts the estimate that financial crime could account for between two and five per cent of European GDP annually, with somewhere between €350billion and €850billion attempting to pass through the European system each year. The problem is that technology moves faster than the regulations adapt to prevent it from happening.
Decentralised finance (DeFi) has become a vector for sanctions evasion and money laundering, precisely because regulators have struggled to keep pace. The Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) latest targeted report, published in July, found that of 142 reporting jurisdictions, just 10 have actually identified qualifying criteria needed by DeFi networks for operating in their territory.

Even where travel rules and compliance frameworks have been legislated for, FATF is adamant that the distance between passing a law and enforcing it remains wide enough for organised crime groups to move billions.

The lessons of history

Krėpšta is keen to frame the harmonisation required as an economic advantage rather than a compliance burden.

“If we create a truly harmonised single system where companies could get access to 400 million-plus clients across Europe, using the same rulebook, and the supervisory practices and guidance are much more convergent, that unlocks a lot of opportunities,” he says. 

The aviation industry provides the model for how this could work. Several decades ago, European air travel was fragmented along national lines. What followed is usually described as deregulation, but Krėpšta looks at it in this way: fragmentation was out-regulated, replaced with a single set of rules, and the result was a genuinely European market – one in which operator Ryanair, for instance, prospered. That’s precisely the pro-business environment Krėpšta believes AMLA can build for financial services.

Research by EY and Frankfurt Main Finance, drawing on interviews with around 50 senior AML professionals across some 40 institutions, found goodwill towards AMLA. Eighty per cent believed the new package would make national financial intelligence units (FIUs) more effective, although 60 per cent also thought it strongly likely they would need to invest in new technology to meet AMLA’s requirements.

Sixty-six per cent anticipated amending customer due diligence and transaction monitoring processes, and 80 per cent expected penalties to increase. That is an expensive and operationally awkward transition for firms in many cases still wrestling with systems built decades ago, so Krėpšta’s positioning of it as a route to market access rather than another supervisory stick is perhaps wise. The same study surfaces a sharper worry, though, and it is about AMLA itself rather than the firms it will supervise.

“AMLA needs to be able to upscale and hire the right people quite quickly,” the head of fincrime at one major insurer told EY. “If it does not, the whole exercise is a bit at risk.”
Meanwhile, a chief compliance officer at a wealth manager wanted ‘less bureaucracy, more agility and greater communication with obliged entities, with basic criteria established from the beginning’.

Conflicting interests

Underneath the rulebook, the supervision and the technical standards lies a single unresolved question, and Krėpšta names it himself. One of AMLA’s stated goals is a public-private partnership in which both sectors exchange information in real time. It is a goal, though, rather than a mechanism, and it is the same goal FATF has pursued without resolution since its Recommendations were first issued in 2012.The obstacle is a genuine collision of legitimate interests. 

Effective anti-money laundering requires data to move quickly across institutional and national borders. Data protection law, and the commercial instincts of banks for whom customer data as an asset, require that it does not. EY’s respondents flagged this challenge and the study’s recommendations include advocating for legal frameworks that facilitate cross-border data aggregation, including revising data protection laws. That is an enormous task, to put it mildly, but AMLA and the European Data Protection Board are now working together on Joint Guidelines on information sharing under Article 75 of Europe’s AML Regulation. From July next year, it will allow companies and professionals covered by anti-money laundering rules to share information with each other and with public authorities, within clear limits.

Worldwide, 80 per cent of financial institutions have identified legacy infrastructure and fragmented data as a major constraint on preventing financial crime. The operational consequence is visible in alert volumes. Napier’s index found the highest volumes of suspicious activity alerts correlated closely with those countries experiencing the biggest GDP losses.

Overstretched systems let things through.

“Financial criminals are like water. They look for cracks,” says Krėpšta. The cracks are not only between member states. They are inside individual institutions, where fraud, sanctions screening and money laundering teams have traditionally operated as separate functions.”

Krėpšta’s answer, and the industry’s, is AI.

“You can only fight against technology in the bad hands with the better technology in the good hands,” he says, citing examples of where AI has improved transaction monitoring tenfold.

Indeed, Napier estimates that $3.3trillion could be returned to global economies through AI-powered AML strategies, with up to $183billion a year in compliance cost savings. Krėpšta puts the societal cost plainly.

Laundering on this scale ‘distorts the fabric of social cohesion’ and reinforces further criminal investment and growth. 

“It’s a big problem and a growing phenomenon, so we all need to stay together.”

The launch of AMLA is a significant move. Harmonising 27 rulebooks into one is real work that will make life meaningfully easier for cross-border institutions. The intractable problem, however, is sharing data across borders and between competitors fast enough to matter.

It’s one that FATF has not cracked in more than a decade of trying, and AMLA inherits it intact. Will the criminals be quaking in their boots? Perhaps not yet. AMLA has until 2028 to prove the carrot of harmonisation is compelling enough to make a change.