International Anti‑Financial Crime Summit 2025

I was honoured to attend the recent International Anti‑Financial Crime Summit 2025 in London, where, as a compliance professional, I found the discussions both timely and compelling. Below is a reflection on my experience: what the summit set out to achieve, some of the noteworthy speakers, and why the emergence of agentic AI-driven approaches is rapidly becoming central to the fight against money laundering and sanctions-screening.

Purpose of the Summit

The summit brought together senior compliance, anti-financial-crime (AFC) and risk practitioners from banks, fintechs, regulators and law-enforcement agencies. According to the event’s organisers, the aim was to provide a forum for “senior FCC leaders and their teams” in London to engage with the evolving threat landscape, especially as regulatory expectations intensify around sanctions circumvention, digital assets and cross-border money-laundering.

In my view, the summit had three core tracks:

• • Threat & regulatory horizon – understanding how regulations such as the UK’s Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act (ECCTA) and global AML/sanctions frameworks are shifting the goal-posts for compliance.
  • Operations & technology – exploring how firms must upgrade their operating models, improve efficiency, share intelligence across the three lines of defence, and adopt new automation and data-sharing capabilities.
  • Innovation & future proofing – how emerging technologies (notably AI) and new paradigms can be harnessed to stay ahead of bad actors who are increasingly sophisticated and agile.

What struck me throughout was an underlying message: firms can no longer simply “meet the rule book”. They must move to being proactive, predictive and intelligent in detecting and disrupting illicit flows.

Notable Speakers

Among the strong line-up of experts, here are a few that stood out:

• Derville Rowland (Executive Board member at the European Banking Authority / AMLA) delivered a keynote addressing regulatory super-vision and the need for stronger enforcement culture.
• Alexander Resch (Head of the financial-crime unit at Europol) spoke about cross-border collaboration and intelligence-led investigations in Europe.
• From the private-sector side, speakers from major banks (such as heads of fraud, sanctions and AML at global banks) emphasised their operational challenges in embedding new technology and embedding “effectiveness” as opposed to just compliance check-boxes. For example the summit agenda pointed to senior practitioners from banks sharing how they are adapting.

These speakers reinforced the message that compliance is no longer a back-office cost, but a strategic business function defending reputational integrity, enabling growth and safeguarding financial systems.

The Big Theme: Agentic AI as the Path Forward

One of the most recurrent themes I heard was the pivotal role of agentic AI — that is, AI systems with a degree of autonomy, orchestration, reasoning, and learning — as the forward-path for compliance with AML (Anti-Money-Laundering) regulations and sanctions screening.

Here’s how I interpret what was discussed:

• Historically, many firms have relied on rule-based systems, manually-driven alerts, and siloed investigations. These are increasingly incapable of keeping pace with rapidly evolving threat-actors, geo-political shifts in sanctions, and the complexity of layered money-laundering networks.
• Agentic AI offers the ability to detect patterns, reason across disparate data sources, prioritise investigations, and take adaptive action (for example, dynamic sanction-screening of emerging counterparties, real-time transaction monitoring, and linking entities across shell-structures).
  • The summit highlighted sessions on “Next-Gen AI for Financial Crime Detection: Unsupervised, Semi-Supervised ML & Graph AI for Real-Time Risk Detection”.
  • Speakers emphasised the need for autonomous “triage” engines, intelligent case routing, and sanction evasion detection that goes beyond static match lists.

• From a regulatory / effectiveness point of view, the industry is shifting from “did you apply all the rules?” to “how effective are your controls?” Agentic AI shows promise to raise that effectiveness bar: it can help firms go from purely reacting to alerts to proactively uncovering hidden risk networks, enabling faster response, and reducing false positives / analyst fatigue.
• There was also discussion about governance, transparency and safety of AI systems — ensuring they are auditable, explainable, robust, and aligned with compliance, data-protection and ethical standards. If we are to deploy agentic AI in the compliance domain, it cannot be a “black box” without clear oversight.
• Practically, the message was: firms should treat agentic AI not as a “nice to have” add-on, but as a fundamental part of the modern compliance architecture — integrated with sanctions screening, customer onboarding/KYC, entity-resolution services, cross-institution data-sharing, and real-time monitoring.

In my remarks at the summit I stressed that the future of AML/sanctions compliance isn’t about more controls, more rules, more alerts—it’s about smarter controls that scale, adapt and reason. And agentic AI is the enabler of that transition.

My Key Take-aways

• The regulatory environment is tightening: sanctions regimes, digital-asset risk, and global transparency initiatives are raising the stakes for non-compliance.
• Technology no longer optional: firms that stick to legacy, static models risk being overtaken by criminals using advanced tech, automation and obfuscation.
• Collaboration is essential: both cross-border data sharing (between firms and with authorities) and internal cross-function integration (fraud, AML, sanctions, intelligence) featured heavily.
• Agentic AI is central: It is not just another tool—it is the next wave of infrastructure for financial crime prevention. But it must be deployed with governance, transparency and strong change-management.
• Culture & change management matter: Technology alone won’t succeed unless institutions align incentives, ensure skills and embed the “effectiveness” mindset (not just box-ticking).

In Conclusion

Attending the International Anti-Financial Crime Summit was invigorating. I left with a renewed sense of purpose—and a sharper view of how compliance must evolve. In the battle against money-laundering, sanctions evasion and illicit finance more broadly, we are at a tipping point. The old paradigms—static processes, manual review, siloed systems—can no longer hold. Agentic AI, if thoughtfully implemented, offers the route to create compliance systems that learn, adapt and reason.

I’m looking forward to bringing these insights back into my work and helping shape the next generation of AFC controls.