The financial crime landscape entering 2026 is undergoing profound structural change. Regulatory approaches across the UK, EU, France, and the U.S. are converging around a common theme: accountability over policy intent, demonstrated by practical compliance. Supervisors are moving beyond policy review toward deeper testing of how controls operate in practice, demanding evidence, data integrity, and demonstrable outcomes. At the same time, criminals are exploiting advances in technology, cross-border networks, and digital financial channels to evolve at speed. The result is a global environment where regulation is pragmatic and dynamic, reflecting ever-changing and emerging financial crime risk. This paper focuses on developments across the jurisdictions covered by Plenitude’s RegSight tools regulatory registers: UK, EU (including France), US, Singapore and Global.
Several strategic shifts define this new era. Sanctions regimes, particularly in relation to Russia, are widening in scope and intensifying in enforcement, with a growing focus on circumvention, trade flows, and the involvement of new technologies. Corporate transparency obligations are expanding, reshaping how firms verify identity, beneficial ownership (BO), and corporate structures. Fraud, Anti-Money Laundering (AML), sanctions evasion, cybercrime, and crypto risks are rapidly converging, erasing boundaries that once allowed firms to manage them separately.
Technology is both an enabler and a pressure point. Supervisors are adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI), analytics, and SupTech capabilities that raise expectations for firms’ own technological maturity. Digital assets and stablecoins are moving into mainstream regulatory frameworks, with stricter demands for governance, substance, and monitoring. AI introduces new risks, synthetic identities, deepfakes, generative fraud, as well as the need for explainability, model oversight, and accountable human control.
In this context, organisations must rethink how their financial crime frameworks operate. The RegIntel Recap and Outlook Paper for 2025/26 distils the year’s developments into a set of forward-looking insights and translates them into an integrated operational roadmap for 2026. The roadmap outlines ten core capabilities that firms will need to build or enhance, ranging from unified risk architecture and effectiveness-by-design controls to explainable AI governance, real-time detection, sanctions intelligence, data modernisation, and continuous adaptation mechanisms. These capabilities reflect a shift toward financial crime management that is intelligence-led, data-driven, interoperable, and resilient.
Amidst regulatory change, the firms best positioned for the years ahead will be those that modernise their operating models, strengthen governance, and build systems capable of responding as quickly as risks emerge. Rather than treating regulatory developments as isolated changes, the paper provides a coherent view of how the landscape is evolving and what it will take to operate effectively within it. Its purpose is to support leaders in shaping financial crime strategies that keep pace with accelerating regulatory expectations, technological disruption, and increasingly sophisticated criminal activity.