Our teams recently attended Europe’s leading financial crime compliance events, including the AML Intelligence European FinCrime Summit, ACAMS Europe, the FCA RegTech Forum, and the ICA Future of Compliance Summit. These conferences offered a front-row seat to the rapid transformation reshaping anti-financial crime compliance.
Here are the 6 key trends that every compliance professional should have on their radar in 2025.
Key Takeaways:
- AI in Compliance: AI Agents and Agentic AI dominate conference discussions, but real adoption remains cautious and narrow. Keeping human oversight at the center remains critical.
- Real-Time AML: With the rise of instant payments and 24/7 financial services, institutions are under growing pressure to shift from static, batch-based monitoring to real-time, intelligence-driven detection.
- The New Face of KYC: KYC is evolving into continuous customer and network monitoring, driven by AI, graph analytics, and dynamic behavioral monitoring.
- Crypto Compliance is maturing, but crypto-related laundering tactics continue to evolve faster than enforcement.
- AMLA’s Single Rulebook aims to unify supervision across the EU, while regulators balance harmonization with local realities.
- Collaboration is key: Breaking down silos internally and expanding public-private partnerships externally are essential to fighting increasingly complex financial crimes.
1. AI in Compliance – The Buzz is Real, The Adoption Less So
AI in compliance remains one of the most discussed—and most hyped—topics across all conferences. Terms like “AI Agents” and “Agentic AI” have become buzzwords, signalling a future where AI-powered systems could assist, or even drive, the investigation process autonomously.
However, when looking at actual adoption on the ground, the reality remains more nuanced and in practice, many financial institutions are still in the early stages of bringing AI into operational use.
A recent Synpulse study focusing on Swiss and Liechtenstein banks reveals that while 97% of institutions indicate strong interest or plans for AI in compliance, only 53% report current adoption. And even among adopters, use cases are often limited, primarily involving third-party KYC solutions with embedded AI capabilities.
In short: AI in compliance remains a top strategic priority — but actual usage today still skews towards selective pilots and narrow use cases.
The vision of AI Agents remains aspirational. At conferences, several speakers discussed future architectures where AI agents ingest data, assess risk, plan investigations, gather evidence, recommend outcomes, and generate full case narratives — but with ultimate human control.
- Human-in-the-loop (HITL) remains essential: While AI may help reduce repetitive work and improve efficiency, human oversight remains critical to ensure accountability, transparency, and regulatory trust.
- Practical hurdles remain: Institutions still face adoption challenges related to integration with legacy systems, managing AI model risks, ensuring data quality, and aligning stakeholders around AI governance.
For now, the most common AI use cases involve targeted functions such as alert prioritization, KYC screening, case summarization, or data enrichment — with human experts firmly in charge of decision-making.
At IMTF, this reality reinforces our hybrid AI approach: combining AI, rule-based logic, automation, and human-in-the-loop design to achieve both efficiency and explainability — empowering organizations to confidently tackle increasingly complex compliance challenges.
2. Real-Time AML and End-to-End Investigation Efficiency
“As we want and need faster payments, we also need faster detection without obviously being flooded with false positives. This means investing in dynamic monitoring systems that can combine multiple sets of data, but also in AI to analyze not only traditional transaction data, but also richer know-your-customer data.” — François Villeroy de Galhau, Governor of Banque de France, ACAMS The Assembly Europe
The rapid acceleration of instant payments and financial crime typologies has created an urgent need for real-time, intelligence-driven compliance systems. Across the conferences, experts emphasized that keeping pace with criminal activity requires not only faster monitoring, but also smarter, more integrated approaches to investigations.
- Dynamic monitoring requires richer, multi-dimensional data.
Static, rules-based batch monitoring systems are increasingly seen as outdated. To achieve timely and accurate detection, institutions need to combine transactional data with behavioral, contextual, and KYC information — building a more complete risk profile in real time.
- Integration across risk domains breaks silos.
Fraud, AML, sanctions, and customer onboarding data are too often managed separately. By converging these data streams, financial institutions can better connect alerts, reveal hidden patterns, and capture suspicious behaviors as they emerge across the entire customer lifecycle.
- AI and GenAI enhance investigator productivity.
While full automation remains limited, AI-powered tools are increasingly being used to support investigators — summarizing alerts, generating case narratives, enriching due diligence files, and helping prioritize workload. Human oversight remains central to ensure compliance standards and trustworthiness.
“AI is a revolution for data management. The biggest change will be a holistic view and management of the client relationship.” — Anne-Catherine Colleau, Head of Group Financial Security at BNP Paribas, ACAMS The Assembly Europe.
End-to-end investigation workflows improve risk visibility.
Ultimately, the integration of dynamic data feeds, AI-powered link analysis, and behavioral analytics allows institutions to move from fragmented, reactive investigations toward proactive, holistic case management — connecting dots across systems, speeding up investigations, and improving decision quality.
3. The new face of KYC: From Static Checks to Dynamic Intelligence
As financial crime techniques grow more sophisticated, Know Your Customer (KYC) processes are shifting from static snapshots to continuous, dynamic understanding of customers and their networks.
Network-based intelligence is reshaping how institutions assess customer risk.
Traditional KYC systems often focused narrowly on individual customer data. Today’s technologies, powered by AI and graph analytics, increasingly map out complex relationships across ownership structures, counterparties, and related entities — revealing hidden connections that may expose organized crime rings, sanctions evasion, fraud networks, or previously exited clients. This ability to untangle intricate corporate linkages and identify Ultimate Beneficial Owners (UBOs) across jurisdictions is becoming essential for both onboarding and ongoing monitoring.
Dynamic behavioural monitoring allows continuous KYC updates.
Authorities like the French Central Bank are advocating for tools that help institutions better meet AML/CTF regulations and that can trigger KYC updates based on customer behaviour, transaction patterns, or changes in risk profiles.
Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD) for Crypto Clients.
For Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs), regulators are enforcing higher standards — requiring VASPs to follow strict AML/CFT rules, including KYC, suspicious transaction report filing, ID verification for transactions over €1,000.
4. Crypto Compliance: New Risks, New Rules
Crypto compliance is maturing, but is still struggling with fast-evolving laundering tactics, fragmented tools, and cross-jurisdictional complexity.
- MiCAR & AMLA’s crypto oversight role: The EU’s MiCAR regulation introduces a unified framework for EU crypto regulation to support AML/CFT rules. AMLA will further enforce crypto due diligence, oversee high-risk institutions, and coordinate data sharing.
- FATF Travel Rule (Rec. 16) Implementation challenges: Despite coming into effect in January 2025, the Travel Rule still faces interoperability gaps due to the absence of unified data exchange protocols for crypto.
- VASP Onboarding & Ongoing KYC: Crypto providers are now held to similar AML standards as banks, including CDD, STR filing, and ongoing monitoring of transactions and counterparties.
- Emerging cross-chain laundering typologies: Privacy coins, DeFi protocols, self-hosted wallets, and cross-chain bridges are increasingly used to obscure transactions. Blockchain analytics and AI are being leveraged to detect suspicious behavior and patterns across fragmented ecosystems.
AMLA’s Vision and the Rise of Smart Supervision
The creation of AMLA represents a milestone in Europe’s move toward unified financial crime supervision, but concerns remain around flexibility, data-sharing, and proportionality of enforcement.
- AMLA’s Direct Supervision Model for High-Risk Institutions: based on the EU’s Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) AMLA will directly oversee 40 high-risk, cross-border financial institutions from 2028, assuming authority from national regulators and the EBA.
- The Role of Article 75 in Enabling Regulated Information Exchange: GDPR’s Article 75 creates the legal framework for regulated, privacy-compliant data exchange among banks and regulators across borders to support joint investigations
- National regulator concerns – Bridging the Gap Between Central Mandates and Local Risk Realities: While the harmonization effort is praised, some regulators voiced concerns about potential prescriptiveness, resource strain, and ensuring local realities are respected within the EU-wide framework.
“While this harmonization is momentous, it also requires a staggering number of resources to get AMLA-ready.” — Tony Cahalan, Central Bank of Ireland
Collaboration and Convergence: Breaking Down Compliance Silos
As financial crime grows more complex, fragmented approaches to detection and investigation are no longer sustainable. Threats cut across channels, products, and jurisdictions — making both internal integration and external collaboration critical.
- Breaking down internal silos: Today’s AI-powered platforms are increasingly able to unify fragmented fraud, AML, and sanctions, and KYC data streams into shared investigation environments. Cross-domain entity resolution, behavioral analytics, and network detection bring together risk signals in real time, enabling a more complete and timely view of financial crime exposure.
- Public-private partnerships in action: Programs like Project ASSET (Europol) and Ireland’s Harcourt Initiative demonstrate how coordinated efforts across law enforcement, regulators, NGOs, and industry can accelerate investigations, freeze assets, and dismantle criminal networks.
- Balancing data sharing and privacy: Cross-border intelligence sharing remains a legal challenge. GDPR Article 75 offers a model for balancing privacy protection with regulated information exchange between institutions and authorities.
Towards holistic enterprise risk platforms: Integrated platforms capable of connecting fraud, AML, sanctions, and KYC data are increasingly seen as essential for enterprise-wide risk oversight and more effective, holistic financial crime prevention.
Conclusion
As financial crime becomes more sophisticated and cross-border, compliance functions are under growing pressure to evolve and stay ahead. The key words:
- More real-time.
- More intelligent.
- More collaborative.
The themes emerging from these conferences aren’t theoretical — they are shaping regulatory expectations and defining what future-ready compliance functions will look like — ensuring both effectiveness and trust in a fast-moving landscape.
At IMTF, we’re not just following these trends — we’re shaping them.
Siron®One is the first truly holistic anti-financial crime platform designed to meet the next generation of compliance challenges head-on. By uniting AI, rule-based detection, intelligent automation, and human-in-the-loop decision-making into one modular solution, Siron®One enables financial institutions to achieve unmatched precision, scalability, and efficiency — and to stay ahead in an increasingly complex regulatory landscape.
👉 Contact us to discover how Siron®One can future-proof your compliance operations.
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