Article 1: AMLA's Roadshow: What 27 conversations across Europe revealed
What happens when AMLA visits all 27 EU Member States to hear firsthand about the challenges of fighting financial crime? Despite different national approaches, the same concerns emerged across Europe. From fragmented supervision to rapidly evolving risks, AMLA's Roadshow reveals five common themes shaping the future of AML/CFT in the EU. Discover the key takeaways in the first article of our series.
Twenty-seven countries, one shared story.
In February 2025, Bruna Szego took up her post as Chair of the EU's newly established Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA), and set herself a clear objective: visit all 27 Member States before the year was out. By December 2025, that objective was met. The findings were published in May 2026 as the AMLA Roadshow 2025 report. Four months on, what it describes still holds, and this series sets those findings alongside what has happened since. Twenty-seven visits might have been expected to produce twenty-seven different pictures. They did not. Supervisory traditions, sectoral make-up, and institutional maturity differ enormously from one Member State to the next. The concerns raised in those conversations barely differ at all: fragmentation, resource pressure, and risks that move faster than the systems built to catch them.
Why the Roadshow matters
AMLA was created to fix a structural problem. The EU's previous AML/CFT framework relied on national transposition of directives, which left supervision fragmented and inconsistent across the Union. AMLA's mandate is to set common standards, promote supervisory convergence, strengthen cooperation between national supervisors and FIUs, and directly supervise a limited number of the most impactful cross-border financial institutions.
To do that credibly, AMLA first needed to understand the operational reality it was stepping into. That is exactly what the Roadshow delivered: public-sector roundtables in all 27 Member States, complemented by private-sector sessions in 24 of them. Those sessions covered banks, insurers, crypto-asset service providers (CASPs), real estate agents, gambling operators, lawyers, notaries, and accountants. All conversations were held under the Chatham House Rule, meaning views are reported here in aggregated form and without attribution to any specific institution;
Five themes, heard everywhere
Despite very different national contexts, supervisory traditions, and levels of institutional maturity, the same five themes surfaced consistently across all 27 Member States:
A fast-moving risk landscape. New laundering methods are not replacing the old ones. They are accumulating on top of them. The familiar routes remain in place, while newer ones appear at a pace set by technological and geopolitical change, leaving supervisors and institutions far less time to act than the systems now in use were built to handle.
Uneven starting points. Member States are not equally far along in how they apply and supervise the AML/CFT rules in force today. Even where the underlying requirements are identical, supervisory methods, risk assessments, enforcement practices, and interpretations of the same obligations differ across the Union. For a bank or insurer operating in several Member States, that means facing different supervisory expectations for comparable risks. It also means the new framework will land on very uneven ground.
Technology as both risk and remedy. Digital innovation is what allows those new laundering methods to emerge and spread quickly. But it is also the most promising means of countering them. Stakeholders see real potential in advanced data analytics, AI-supported tools, interoperable data infrastructures, and greater automation. Many also call for stronger EU-level analytical capacity and, over time, shared tools rather than 27 national solutions built in parallel.
A reform that is broadly welcomed. The Single Rulebook makes the same AML/CFT requirements directly applicable in every Member State without national transposition. Stakeholders see a genuine opportunity in that: greater legal certainty, less duplication for groups operating across borders, and a level playing field in which compliance is less likely to become a competitive disadvantage.
High expectations of AMLA, not all of them well directed. Stakeholders want guidance on emerging risks, simplification of the rules, and shared supervisory tools. Not all of those expectations fall within AMLA's remit. AMLA completes the framework through technical standards and guidance, but the obligations themselves were set by the EU legislator. Requests for exemptions or lighter rules would therefore require a change in the legislation. Other expectations are matters for national supervisors, who remain responsible for awareness-raising and support to obliged entities.
Each of these themes is unpacked in the articles that follow.
What this tells us
What stands out is not the diversity of national contexts, real as it is, but how much common ground there is underneath it. That gives AMLA a clear mandate, but also a clear responsibility: to stay grounded in operational reality as it builds out its standards, guidance, and supervisory tools.
Some of that work is already under way. Clearer guidance on the tension between AML/CFT obligations and data protection was one of the most consistent requests across the 27 visits, and AMLA is addressing it together with the European Data Protection Supervisor and the European Data Protection Board. Whether the wider programme delivers what stakeholders asked for is the subject of the final article in this series.
In the next article, we take a closer look at the risk landscape that supervisors and industry described in every single Member State, from AI-enabled fraud to sanctions evasion.
