The UK government has described its Anti-Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Strategy 2026-2029 as a "turning point" in the fight against illicit finance.
Anti-Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Strategy 2026-2029: ministers want the UK to become a ‘hostile environment for dirty money’ | Credit: Global Government Finance montage of strategy document front cover overlaid on a photo by Nikolay Dimitrov (Unsplash)
The UK government has described its Anti-Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Strategy 2026-2029 as a “turning point” in the fight against illicit finance.
The National Crime Agency estimates more than £100bn (US$134bn) is laundered through the UK or UK corporate structures each year.
Commitments in the new strategy include the establishment of the National Financial Intelligence Service to “detect and disrupt criminal funds as never before and give law enforcement the tools and technology they need to keep pace with an evolving threat”; to “reform anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing supervision to raise standards and support the vast majority of professionals who act as responsible gatekeepers”; and “extend our reach to trace and seize illicit funds, including those hidden in cryptoassets”.
In the 101-page document’s ministerial foreword, security minister Dan Jarvis and economic secretary to the Treasury Lucy Rigby state an aim to “make the UK a hostile environment for dirty money”.
The UK has recently made “clear progress” in what is an increasingly complex area, they write, referencing successes including ‘Operation Destabilise’, an international National Crime Agency-led investigation into Russian money-laundering networks. “But the threat is evolving rapidly,” Jarvis and Rigby continue. “If we do not keep up, we will fall behind. That is not something this government is prepared to accept.”
The Anti-Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Strategy 2026-2029 (AMLAR), which was published on 15 September, is funded by at least £550m (US$737m) of investment. It has three pillars – ‘Target’, ‘Integrate’ and ‘Empower’ – and three core objectives.
The Target pillar is to “focus time and effort on the criminals and activities that cause the most harm, cutting back low-value ‘box-ticking’ work”; the Integrate pillar is for improved sharing of information and co-working, “so we can spot suspicious activity sooner and coordinate action to stop it”; and the Empower pillar is to “give the system the right people, training, technology and legal powers to act quickly, and remove barriers that slow things down”.
The core objectives are to “make the UK’s defences more effective and efficient, while making it simpler and safer for honest businesses to grow”; “disrupt money laundering, dismantling high-harm criminal networks at home and abroad, including those operating on our high streets”; and “recover more criminal assets, returning money to law enforcement, victims and the public”.
Of the funding, £520m (US$691m) will come from the Economic Crime Levy (an annual charge on entities supervised under money laundering regulations), with the remaining £30m (US$40m) from a high streets package announced at Budget 2025.
By the end of strategy, the government wants to achieve results including: more assets recovered, including cross-border cryptoasset seizures; ownership data being “more accurate, searchable and exploited to trace assets linked to hostile actors and corrupt elites”; and “artificial intelligence and advanced analytics improving the identification, investigation and disruption of money laundering”.
Read more from our sister title, Global Government Finance: UK government publishes new fraud strategy as cases hit record level
The AMLAR strategy arrives six months after the government published its long-awaited Fraud Strategy 2026-2029 – which aims to tackle crime costing the country’s economy more than £14bn (US$18.6bn) a year – and more than nine months after the publication of the UK Anti-Corruption Strategy 2025, which includes 123 commitments across government.
The three strategies are part of the government’s overall approach to economic crime, to be set out in the Economic Crime Plan 2026–29. National responsibility for economic crime, including money laundering and asset recovery, are to move to the planned National Police Service (NPS). The National Crime Agency (NCA) will move into the NPS as part of these reforms.
Online criminality, as well as technologies such as AI, cryptoassets and “wider fintech” are “making it easier to move and conceal money at scale, including across borders,” the AMLAR strategy’s executive summary states.
Specific commitments include 500 new law enforcement officers and specialists to be recruited and deployed across police forces, the NCA and Crown Prosecution Service by the end of 2029 to “follow the money behind serious and organised crime, including through Russian and other international money laundering networks”.
Establishing new financial intelligence functions, and strengthening existing ones
The AMLAR strategy explains that the National Financial Intelligence Service (NFIS) will be established – hosted by the National Economic Crime Centre, which is itself housed within the NCA – and will “integrate national and international public-private financial intelligence capabilities to enable earlier identification of criminality, faster action and more effective disruption”.
The UK Financial Intelligence Unit (UKFIU), which is also housed with the NCA, was recently described as “one of the most materially significant structural weaknesses in the country’s economic crime system” in a report by the Royal United Services Institute think tank.
The AMLAR strategy states that the government will “strengthen the UKFIU through AI-enabled technology, increased staffing and enhanced information-gathering powers”, and ensure it has access to the legislative powers it needs “to perform its functions effectively”.
The NFIS, meanwhile, will “bring together” Data Fusion and the Joint Money Laundering Intelligence Taskforce (JMLIT) – both pre-existing public-private partnerships – and “align” UKFIU intelligence functions. Activities will include “extending established bank partnerships to other sectors, including cryptoasset firms, money service businesses and electronic money institutions” and “building stronger international links to share data and shared threats”.
Read more: ‘Fraudsters thrive in fragmentation’: how government agencies are tackling fraud in the digital age
‘Systemic shift’ underway – but ‘blind spots’ to address
In response to the AMLAR strategy, Sal Melki, the NCA deputy director for economic crime, said: “Combatting financial crime has become more complex as criminals embrace new technologies to increase the scale and harm of their offending. Our foundations are strong, and now the NCA and our partners are driving a systemic shift to modernise our approach to combatting all forms of illicit finance. This strategy and the investment behind it will be key to achieving this.
“It will allow us to build an innovative financial intelligence service for the UK, deepen our public private partnerships, and – crucially – increase our operational capacity to proactively target money launderers and the financial architecture they rely on. We will pursue them across borders, seize their criminal wealth and remove them from our businesses, institutions and high streets.”
Steve Smart, the Financial Conduct Authority executive director of enforcement and market oversight, added: “A whole-system effort, both at home and abroad, is the only way we can crack down on organised crime and combat threats to national security and economic stability. Reforms to anti-money laundering supervision provide a golden opportunity to strengthen the supervision of professional services, ensure more consistent oversight and help us identify and disrupt crime.”
However, Veronica Stratford-Tuke, a research fellow in the Royal United Services Institute’s Centre for Finance and Security (CFS), had a mixed reaction to the AMLAR strategy.
“The strategy is welcome, especially the commitment for law enforcement and the private sector to work together on the most harmful money laundering, rather than box ticking. But improvements on paper are not the same as keeping dirty money out of the UK,” she said.
She said experts at the institute had identified “important blind spots the UK will need to address for the strategy to have its desired impact”, including public-private partnerships (PPP), resourcing and anti-money laundering reform.
On public-private partnerships, for example, she said: “PPP success to date is mostly information sharing between banks and law enforcement, and sharing information and acting on it are not the same. How law enforcement builds the depth of relationships with fintech, crypto asset, legal and accountancy firms, and how each finds shared value in aligning their efforts, will be vital.”
Read more: AI to ‘dominate next four to five years’ of fraud landscape: UK fraud minister
This article was originally published by Global Government Forum’s sister title, Global Government Finance: AML strategy to be ‘turning point’ in tackling dirty money, says UK government
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