FATF’s UK Presidency Opens With a Fraud-First Mandate and a Reshuffled Grey List

The Financial Action Task Force’s leadership transition became formal on July 1, as Giles Thomson of the United Kingdom assumed the FATF presidency for a two-year term running through June 2028, succeeding Mexico’s Elisa de Anda Madrazo and inheriting an organization whose June plenary in Paris had just reshuffled the list of jurisdictions under increased monitoring and set a strategic direction that compliance functions worldwide will need to track closely over the coming two years. The plenary, held June 17 through 19, added Iraq and Bosnia and Herzegovina to the grey list while removing Algeria and Namibia, bringing the total number of jurisdictions under increased monitoring to twenty-two, with the black list of high-risk jurisdictions subject to a call for action — Iran, North Korea, and Myanmar — remaining unchanged.

Thomson’s presidency arrives with an explicitly stated priority that marks a rhetorical shift from recent FATF cycles: rather than centering technical standard-setting as the primary vehicle for progress, the incoming presidency has committed to stepping up the international response to what it has termed a global fraud epidemic, with particular attention to the money-laundering and terrorist-financing risks flowing from scam-compound operations that have proliferated across Southeast Asia in recent years. That framing builds directly on evidence surfaced in FATF’s own reporting, including the Cambodia-based laundering infrastructure identified in the organization’s July virtual-asset update, which processed both organized-crime fraud proceeds and cyber-theft funds tied to North Korean state actors through a single piece of financial infrastructure — precisely the kind of scam-compound-adjacent laundering network the new presidency has identified as a strategic target.

Beyond the fraud mandate, the June plenary approved several workstreams that compliance and legal teams should treat as near-term deliverables rather than distant standard-setting exercises. A public consultation opened in late June on new guidance supporting FATF’s strengthened cross-border payment transparency standard under Recommendation 16, aimed at improving payment transparency specifically to combat fraud alongside traditional money laundering and terrorist financing concerns — a direct institutional response to the same fraud-epidemic framing that defines Thomson’s broader presidential mandate. The plenary also approved a new Global Overview of Public and Private Sector Partnerships and Data Protection Arrangements, due for publication in July, which will catalog different national models for information-sharing between financial institutions and government authorities while remaining consistent with data protection requirements — a topic of increasing relevance as jurisdictions experiment with real-time, cross-institutional fraud and laundering intelligence sharing that inevitably raises data protection questions FATF has historically left to individual jurisdictions to resolve.

Mutual evaluation activity continued in parallel, with the plenary adopting joint FATF-Asia/Pacific Group evaluation reports for Canada and a separate mutual evaluation for Türkiye, both scheduled for formal publication between September and October following a Global Network quality and consistency review. Institutions with material exposure to either jurisdiction should treat the pending publication as a signal to prepare for potential recalibration of country risk ratings once the assessments become public, particularly given that mutual evaluation cycles increasingly weight effectiveness — whether a country’s AML/CFT measures demonstrably work in practice — more heavily relative to pure technical compliance with FATF’s recommendations than earlier evaluation cycles did.

One additional technical update deserves specific attention from sanctions and humanitarian finance compliance teams: FATF updated its guidance under Recommendation 6 to explicitly carry forward the humanitarian exemption established in UN Security Council Resolutions 2664 and 2761, clarifying that targeted financial sanctions frameworks should not inadvertently block legitimate humanitarian assistance or the provision of basic human needs. For institutions supporting humanitarian payment corridors into sanctioned or grey-listed jurisdictions, the update provides additional regulatory grounding for maintaining those channels without triggering sanctions-related de-risking concerns, provided the underlying due diligence can demonstrate the humanitarian character of the transactions involved. Combined with the incoming UK presidency’s stated intent to strengthen implementation of the risk-based approach across the FATF network, the overall message for July 2026 is one of continuity in standards accompanied by a genuine shift in enforcement emphasis toward fraud, effectiveness, and cross-border information sharing rather than further expansion of the underlying rulebook itself.