Anti-money laundering controls and the compliance tasks they create are crucial for private bankers, wealth managers and others. The UK government unveiled a new three-year strategy yesterday.

Yesterday, the UK government announced a new anti-money laundering strategy for the next three years, saying that it will add an additional 500 staff and invest “at least” £550 million ($739.5 million) into these efforts. 

The strategy will roll out over three years to 2029, according to a statement from the UK Treasury and Home Office that was presented to lawmakers in parliament.

Asset recovery is that the heart of its strategy, the 101-page statement, entitled Anti-money laundering and asset recovery strategy 2026-2029, said. It also set out organisational changes designed to give enforcement action more scope and teeth.

In the first year, part of the strategy will be to “further disrupt Russian-speaking professional money laundering networks,” it said. 

Another goal is to create the National Crime Agency Asset Recovery Office and launch a public-private asset recovery pilot programme. The government said it will draft legislation to give the UK Financial Intelligence Unit new powers to gather information and expand the number of specialists within policing to deal with suspicious activity reports, aka SARs. (The unit has national responsibility for receiving, analysing and disseminating intelligence submitted through the SARs system.)

Reforming AML supervision will consolidate AML supervision of lawyers, accountants and trust and company service providers under the Financial Conduct Authority, the UK financial regulator, in 2028.

“We have made clear progress. Reforms to our economic crime system, and closer collaboration across government, law enforcement, supervisors and industry are delivering stronger results, with operations like Destabilise, which dismantled billion-dollar Russian money laundering networks, and Machinize, which raided hundreds of high street criminal fronts, showing what is possible when we act together with ambition and coordination,” the strategy document said. “But the threat is evolving rapidly. If we do not keep up, we will fall behind. That is not something this Government is prepared to accept.”

Depending on which measures are used, the UK ranks near the top, or further down, measures of anti-money laundering compliance, and AML remains a major issue for private banks and others seeking to onboard clients. Back in December 2018, a study from the Financial Action Task Force, the intergovernmental body, it said the UK’s AML and counter-terrorist financing regime was the strongest of more than 60 countries that the FATF had assessed. However, the Basel AML Index, an annual, risk-based measure, scored 177 jurisdictions on vulnerability to money laundering, with a lower score meaning lower risk. In the 2025 edition of that Index, the UK scored 4.04, placing it in  128th position. The NCA said in July last year that more than £100 billion is laundered through or within the UK each year. 

The UK paper identified areas that have improved. 

More than 33,000 entities registered on the Register of Overseas Entities and more than 106,000 addresses have been removed from the Companies House register where personal data was used without consent, as of the end of the 2025-26 financial year. 

“The UK has made strong progress over the last decade, and three years on from the publication of Economic Crime Plan 2 (ECP2), performance is improving across the board. In the financial year 2025/26, there were 3,158 system-wide illicit finance disruptions (up 15 per cent on 2024/25), and 4,085 money laundering convictions (up 11 per cent on 2024/25),” the document said.

“Asset recovery is also increasing with £345.3 million recovered (up 9 per cent on the six-year median), £1.1 billion denied to criminals (up 17 per cent on the six-year median), and £26.1 million returned to victims (up 29 per cent on the six-year median).

Gatekeeper
The document said that one measure, envisaged in the third year of the three-year rollout of steps, “will ensure that Companies House is fully embedded as an active gatekeeper, with identity verification operational AI tools deployed in live investigations, and NCA (National Crime Agency) horizon-scanning identifying misuse of new technologies.”

“Taken together, these reforms aim to improve the UK’s overall ability to spot and act on illicit finance risks, by strengthening intelligence flows, sharpening the focus on those who enable money laundering, and making supervision more consistently effective. This will give the system a clearer view of where risk sits across the whole economy, not only within the anti-money laundering and counter terrorist financing (AML/CTF) regulated perimeter,” it said. 

The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), the UK defence and security think tank, said new enforcement and other structures are not a magic bullet.

“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,” Veronica Stratford-Tuke, research fellow at the Centre for Finance and Security at RUSI, said in a statement. 

RUSI's experts have identified blind spots which the UK will need to address for the strategy to have its desired impact, and they include areas such as public-private partnership. The success of PPPs so far 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 relationship with fintech, crypto asset, legal and accountancy firms, and how each finds shared value in aligning their efforts, will be vital,” Stratford-Tuke said.

Although she welcomed the new funding, Stratford-Tuke said that money comes from annual payments from regulated firms through the Economic Crime Levy, and that is not a sustainable funding model.  

But this won’t automatically improve the prevention and detection of money laundering, and the government needs to define what will make the reform work in practice, she added.

(WealthBriefing is speaking to AML and know-your-client experts about this matter, and we intend to follow these issues closely.)