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Cyber security has graduated from a technology discipline to a board-level operational resilience requirement. The European Union's Digital Operational Resilience Act became fully applicable in January 2025, and is now in its first full year of supervisory enforcement; the UK's Operational Resilience framework is approaching its 2025 transition deadline; and the United States is finalising rules under the SEC, OCC, and FFIEC that align increasingly closely with the European m

The cyber posture of a Tier 1 bank is increasingly only as strong as the weakest third-party SaaS vendor in its delivery chain. Concentration risk in cloud, identity, and observability tooling has turned into one of the most material — and least managed — operational risks in financial services.

The quantum-computing community has stopped arguing about whether a cryptographically relevant quantum computer is possible and has moved on to arguing about when. Conservative estimates put cryptanalytically useful quantum capability at the early 2030s. Less conservative ones put it sooner. Either way, the half-life of payment messages, card cryptograms and TLS-protected session keys means the harvest-now-decrypt-later attack model already applies to any sensitive material m

The periodic customer review — the calendar-driven exercise in which a financial institution refreshes KYC and risk data on a low, medium or high c...

The 2025 rollout of the Visa Acquirer Monitoring Programme — VAMP — was treated initially as a tidying-up exercise that consolidated the old Visa D...

A bustling urban market serving as a gateway for business expansion. Expanding into new markets can be one of the most exhilarating steps a business can take. Not only does it offer new opportunities, but it also poses a range of challenges. With the globalization of commerce, many businesses seek to broaden their horizons beyond their national boundaries. Whether you are a startup or an established brand, understanding the basics of market expansion is essential for reaching

In today's digital age, fraud has escalated to unprecedented levels, impacting businesses and individuals alike. As technology evolves,...

Expanding your business globally can be one of the most rewarding yet challenging endeavors you will face. As markets become more...

A quiet legislative milestone in Hong Kong this month may prove to be one of the most transformative anti-financial crime initiatives in...

Hong Kong has long been a titan in global finance, but its latest moves signal a seismic shift toward embracing the digital future. In...

The post-quantum cryptography conversation in financial services has been led by cyber and infrastructure teams. It needs to be a financial crime conversation too. Sanctions screening, transaction monitoring and customer-data integrity all rely on cryptographic primitives that have a finite shelf life, and the regulators that oversee financial crime programmes are starting to ask how institutions intend to preserve evidentiary integrity through the migration.

Most fraud-prevention investment over the last decade has been at the sending bank. Reimbursement reform has shifted that calculus. With the receiving bank now sharing liability for APP-style scams across the UK, EU and an expanding set of Asia-Pacific markets, mule detection at the receive side is becoming a strategic capability rather than a back-office check. The institutions that build it well will see fewer cases, better customer outcomes and lower exposure.

Authorised Push Payment fraud has moved from the fringes of fraud reporting to the centre of regulatory attention. With the UK's Payment Systems Regulator now enforcing 50-50 liability sharing between sending and receiving payment service providers, and similar consumer-protection proposals under active consideration in the EU and across Asia-Pacific, financial institutions face a structural shift in how fraud losses are allocated. Controls built for an era of caveat-emptor p

Reimbursement reform has changed the economics of Authorised Push Payment fraud, but it has not changed the underlying scam. With sending and receiving banks now sharing liability across an expanding set of jurisdictions, the strategic question for fraud leaders is no longer whether to reimburse — it is how to disrupt scams in real time before the money moves.

The Wolfsberg Group's 2026 refresh of its core principles signals the most substantive evolution in correspondent banking guidance in several years. The update consolidates lessons from recent enforcement actions, recognises the operational reality of cross-border payment modernisation, and pushes member banks toward more risk-sensitive, data-driven due diligence. The implications extend well beyond the thirteen Wolfsberg members. Because non-member banks typically adopt Wolf

The sanctions designation of Tornado Cash was supposed to be a turning point in the fight against on-chain money laundering. In practice, it accelerated the diversification of obfuscation techniques rather than eliminating them. The mixer ecosystem of 2026 looks materially different from that of 2022, and compliance teams need an updated mental model. Criminals have adapted in four directions: decentralised alternatives, cross-chain bridges, privacy-preserving layer-2 protoco

The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act has now been in force long enough to assess its real-world impact. The reforms to Companies House, the failure-to-prevent fraud offence, and the expanded identity verification requirements represented the UK's most ambitious anti-economic-crime reform package in decades. Two years on, the picture is mixed. Transparency has improved in measurable ways. Enforcement capacity has expanded. But structural weaknesses in verification

Banking-as-a-Service has transformed how fintechs, retailers, and gig-economy platforms deliver financial products. The model has also exposed a recurring structural weakness. The sponsor bank holds the licence and the regulatory accountability, while the customer experience, onboarding decisions and monitoring rules sit largely with the platform partner. When fraud or money laundering controls fail in this model, the consequences land squarely with the bank. Recent enforceme

The first half of 2026 has produced some of the largest sanctions enforcement actions on record. Regulators on both sides of the Atlantic have moved decisively against institutions whose screening controls failed to keep pace with the rapid expansion of sanctions perimeters since 2022. The pattern of failure is remarkably consistent. It is rarely the absence of a screening tool that drives enforcement. It is almost always the quality of the data feeding that tool, the calibra

Hong Kong's Stablecoin Ordinance has moved the territory from permissive experimentation to one of the world's most detailed regulatory regimes for fiat-referenced stablecoin issuance. The HKMA now licenses issuers, sets reserve and redemption standards, and imposes direct financial crime obligations on a new class of regulated entity. For global banks, payment providers and fintechs with Asia-Pacific operations, the ordinance is not merely a local compliance exercise. It cre