The Global Coalition to Fight Financial Crime (GCFFC) brings public authorities, financial institutions, technology firms, civil society and academia together to tackle financial crime as a shared problem. Its Annual Summit is where that community takes stock. After Stockholm in 2024 and Abu Dhabi in 2025, the third Summit met in Vilnius on 22–23 October 2026, hosted by the AML Center of Excellence at ISM University of Management and Economics with Go Vilnius. About 170 participants from Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia-Pacific and the Americas examined financial crime in the digital age: artificial intelligence, cross-border threats and data privacy.

The central finding is simple to state and hard to act on. The data, the tools and the goodwill needed to fight financial crime already exist, but they rarely meet. Financial institutions hold intelligence they believe they cannot pass on, although the law often allows more than they assume. FIUs receive reports they cannot match across borders, and NGOs map criminal networks without knowing whom in the financial system to tell. Criminals face none of these frictions. They rent fraud kits, laundering services, and AI agents, and move value through instant payments, stablecoins and online games faster than rules can follow.

Participants saw three shifts in the threat. AI is turning age-old frauds into industrial operations and defeating the identity checks on which onboarding depends. A single criminal service economy now supports fraud, drug trafficking, sanctions evasion and environmental crime alike, with corruption greasing its wheels. And some of the most damaging flows, including trade-based laundering, environmental crime and the financing of atrocities, remain under-recognised in risk assessments and legal frameworks.

The obstacles to a better response are as much institutional as technical. A significant number of problems, such as basic oversight and information gathering for crypto-assets, fall between mandates and belong to no one.

Legal uncertainty breeds caution and de-risking. Resources are stretched even in wealthy economies, and the leading agencies fighting financial crime remain modest in headcount. Geopolitics strains the trust on which sharing depends.

Beneath all of this lies a question of effectiveness. Compliance spending runs to hundreds of billions of dollars a year, while recorded confiscation stays small and the preventive effect goes unmeasured. Participants agreed that crime cannot be eradicated, but its choke points can be found, and that the system must show its results.

The Summit also heard what works. Anti-scam centres in Hong Kong and Singapore, where banks and police sit side by side, stop money before it leaves. Regulators in countries as diverse as Rwanda and Mexico are building AI agents that find scam websites and gather evidence for enforcement. Forfeiture and gold tracing in Africa and Latin America take the profit out of environmental crime. In Europe, the new AML framework and privacy-enhancing technologies show that information sharing and data protection can reinforce each other. Where no institution owns a problem, above all identifying who controls a crypto wallet, participants asked GCFFC to act as the neutral space in which public and private actors close the gap together. GCFFC also called on its members to share good practice through video stories and skill sharing, because solutions that work in one jurisdiction can serve as a toolbox and inspiration for others.

The timing is favourable. The Coalition's agenda overlaps closely with the FATF's priorities for 2026–2028: fraud, a more effective risk-based approach, and public-private information sharing, which the FATF plans to write into its standards. That gives the Summit's recommendations a direct route into international policy.

Headline recommendations

1. Build information-sharing partnerships around a defined purpose and judge them by outcomes: funds frozen, cases opened, assets recovered.

2. Give such partnerships legal certainty, in the EU through the joint guidance on Article 75 AMLR and globally through the planned FATF standard on public-private sharing, and treat privacy-enhancing technologies as evidence of proportionality. The Coalition proposes the AML Center of Excellence in Lithuania, with its public-private collaboration model, as a best practice for other jurisdictions.

3. Agree practical rules for AI in compliance and investigations: human accountability for material decisions, defined levels of autonomy, court-ready explanations and “know your agent” controls. A proposed new AI Center of Expertise would address the challenges of human oversight of AI and regulatory overload.

4. Adopt the anti-scam centre model, with real-time cooperation between banks, telecoms, platforms and police, and share responsibility for losses.

5. Make it easier for authorities to identify who controls crypto wallets, through a public-private Wallet Attribution Center with a common methodology and a trusted data channel.

6. Bring neglected crimes into the mainstream: trade-based money laundering in national risk assessments, environmental crimes as money laundering predicates, and atrocity financing within AML frameworks.

7. Replace one-off training with sustained, operational, case-based learning that reaches both frontline staff and decision makers and spans the whole evidence chain.

8. Measure the effectiveness of AML systems by their outcomes, taking into account contextual factors such as political interference or geographic location, and focus resources on higher risks.

By the 2027 Summit, the Coalition aims to present a first joint risk assessment combining FIU, INTERPOL and private-sector data.

The full paper, with the findings and recommendations for each theme, the new centres and the proposed workstreams, is available to download below.