Giles Thomson, the new president of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), has unveiled a multi-year roadmap to tackle fraud losses he says amount to $500bn a year worldwide. Thomson set out the plan on 1 July 2026, the opening day of his two-year term leading the international AML watchdog under the UK’s presidency.
According to Alessa, the move marks a shift for an organisation that has traditionally treated fraud as secondary to money laundering and terrorist financing.
Alessa recently discussed how the FATF president recently unveiled new roadmap to combat $500bn fraud epidemic.
Compliance teams at banks, credit unions, FinTechs and payment providers should now expect fraud typologies, best practice guidance and possible changes to how the FATF applies its existing standards.
The roadmap runs in two stages. From July to October 2026, the FATF will gather detailed fraud typologies from banks, regulators and policymakers, with particular attention paid to scam compounds, the industrial-scale operations driving much of the world’s romance fraud, investment scams and pig butchering schemes.
The second stage shifts from evidence gathering to action, with recommendations expected by February 2027 on how the FATF can extend its existing toolkit. Implementation will then run through to June 2028.
FATF president Giles Thomson said, “We will very quickly then move on in a second stage, to look at what is working well, best practices, and how we can scale those.”
The urgency stems from the scale of the problem. FATF president Giles Thomson said, “The scale of the threat from fraud costs $500 billion a year across the world.” He added that fraud was “the predominant predicate offense in 90% of the FATF mutual evaluations done across the global network in our last round.”
Thomson, who also serves as director for economic crime and sanctions at HM Treasury, was candid about the limits of the FATF’s reach. FATF president Giles Thomson said, “We recognize that the FATF is not going to be the entire solution at a global level. But we think we can be a much bigger part of the solution through the global network that we have.”
Alongside the roadmap, the FATF will form a private sector consultative group to guide the project team and will host a “Global Response Against Fraud” event in spring 2027, building on the UNODC-INTERPOL Global Fraud Summit.
For compliance teams, three implications stand out: typology requests will arrive before October 2026, transaction monitoring tuned to mule activity and cross-border scam flows will face greater scrutiny, and fraud and AML functions are likely to converge further as fraud is folded into the AML predicate offence framework.
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