August 9, 2026

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August 9, 2026

Newsletter

The European Post

Policy • Diplomacy • Strategic Insight

LATEST
New EU Gas Market Rules Take Effect With Consumer SafeguardsDeforestation Regulation Holds Its December Deadline Despite CutsDigital Omnibus Delays Europe’s High-Risk AI Deadline to 2027Europe’s Schools Confront a Widening Basic Skills GapRule of Law Report Finds Progress but Trust Still LagsIRIS2 Gains 66 Satellites as Brussels Signs the Rollout DealNature Restoration Plans Come Due as Member States Race a DeadlineECB Rates Hold at 2.25 Percent as Frankfurt Waits on the DataEU Budget Talks Turn to Cohesion as Ireland Takes OverWildfire Response Stretches Europe’s Emergency Fleet ThinCan Europe’s Quantum Plan Match Its Big Ambitions?Armenia Edges West as Moscow’s Grip Slips AwayEurope Inherits the World’s Aid Bill It Cannot Fully PayAir Passenger Rights Get Their First Overhaul in Two DecadesErasmus Opens a 5 Billion Euro Round for Skills and MobilityCeuta Crisis Pushes the EU Toward Faster Migrant ReturnsBulky Parcels Face a Packaging Crackdown From August 12Can Europe Build Its Drone Wall Before 2030 Arrives?Indonesia’s Trade Deal With Europe Nears Its Final SignatureEurope Leans on Beijing to Keep Climate Talks Alive Before AntalyaNew EU Gas Market Rules Take Effect With Consumer SafeguardsDeforestation Regulation Holds Its December Deadline Despite CutsDigital Omnibus Delays Europe’s High-Risk AI Deadline to 2027Europe’s Schools Confront a Widening Basic Skills GapRule of Law Report Finds Progress but Trust Still LagsIRIS2 Gains 66 Satellites as Brussels Signs the Rollout DealNature Restoration Plans Come Due as Member States Race a DeadlineECB Rates Hold at 2.25 Percent as Frankfurt Waits on the DataEU Budget Talks Turn to Cohesion as Ireland Takes OverWildfire Response Stretches Europe’s Emergency Fleet ThinCan Europe’s Quantum Plan Match Its Big Ambitions?Armenia Edges West as Moscow’s Grip Slips AwayEurope Inherits the World’s Aid Bill It Cannot Fully PayAir Passenger Rights Get Their First Overhaul in Two DecadesErasmus Opens a 5 Billion Euro Round for Skills and MobilityCeuta Crisis Pushes the EU Toward Faster Migrant ReturnsBulky Parcels Face a Packaging Crackdown From August 12Can Europe Build Its Drone Wall Before 2030 Arrives?Indonesia’s Trade Deal With Europe Nears Its Final SignatureEurope Leans on Beijing to Keep Climate Talks Alive Before Antalya

AMLA Sets August Data Deadline For 2027 Direct Supervision List

Khamzat Chimaev
Brussels Bureau Chief, Financial Services and Banking

The architecture of the European Union’s first dedicated anti-money laundering supervisor is no longer notional. The Anti-Money Laundering Authority, headquartered in Frankfurt and operational since 1 July 2025, has published the consultation package and reporting instructions that national supervisors will use over the summer to identify which financial institutions meet the criteria for direct supervision when AMLA picks its first cohort of forty entities in 2027. The exercise has a date attached: national supervisors must transmit data by 15 August 2026, with an error correction and alignment phase running into September and a provisional list of eligible obliged entities expected to be finalised by the end of that month.

Two draft regulatory technical standards form the backbone of the framework. The first specifies the data points and methodology that national supervisors will be required to use when assessing money laundering and terrorist financing risks for the entities they oversee. The second applies those same data points and criteria to set out how AMLA itself will assess risk for the purposes of selecting entities for direct supervision. The breakthrough in administrative terms is the use of a common methodology across all twenty-seven Member States, replacing the patchwork of national risk assessment templates that complicated cross-border supervisory cooperation in the EBA’s pre-2025 mandate.

Selection is restricted to credit institutions, other financial institutions and crypto-asset service providers that operate in at least six Member States and meet defined risk-profile criteria across customer base, products, geographies and delivery channels. The forty-entity ceiling has been treated as a hard constraint inside the Authority’s drafting room. AMLA chair Bruna Szego has signalled in recent public appearances that the first cohort will be skewed toward large pan-European banking groups, with a smaller allocation of payment institutions, electronic money institutions and crypto-asset service providers chosen to test the supervisory toolkit against the parts of the financial system where the new single rulebook will bite hardest.

The supervisory transition will not flip cleanly. Direct supervision of the selected forty begins in 2028, which gives the Authority and the entities concerned an unusually long calibration runway. AMLA’s 2026 to 2028 work programme is sequenced accordingly: methodology testing and joint supervisory teams will be built out through this year, the selection process will run in 2027 and direct supervision will go live the following January. National supervisors retain the lead for everyone else, but AMLA’s database, common methodology and binding mediation powers in cross-border disputes will reshape day-to-day practice well before the formal transfer of competence.

The European Banking Authority’s own 2026 work programme, published earlier this year, dovetails with the AMLA timeline rather than competing with it. The EBA is preparing the 2027 EU-wide stress test, with climate risk integration finalised in the methodology, and continuing to deliver around 140 technical mandates linked to the Capital Requirements Regulation 3 and Capital Requirements Directive 6 package, which has been in force since 1 January 2025. The postponement of certain market risk framework elements to 1 January 2026 created what the EBA has flagged as a near-term arbitrage exposure with United States banks operating in the bloc, and supervisory dialogue with the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England is being used to manage the divergence.

For the institutions likely to make the first forty, the immediate question is operational. Group AML officers are already preparing the data calls under the August deadline, and several large banks have signalled in earnings commentary that they expect to staff AMLA-facing functions on a similar scale to their European Central Bank Single Supervisory Mechanism liaison teams, with the cost falling inside the compliance line for 2027 budgets.

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