Frankfurt am Main: The EU’s new money laundering rules take effect on 10 July 2027, and the Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA) now has about eight months to build the supervision machine that will enforce them. At the A&L Goodbody Corporate Crime and Regulation Summit on 14 October 2026, AMLA executive board member Derville Rowland told delegates that the authority will directly supervise up to 40 financial groups from 2028.

The Law Society Gazette reported on 27 October 2026 that conservative estimates put annual losses to money laundering above €750 billion across the Union. Drug trafficking, human trafficking and fast-rising fraud drive most of that figure. Rowland and other speakers pointed to fragmented national oversight as a core weakness, and the new framework replaces that patchwork with a single rulebook. In practice, the money laundering rules create one set of duties for banks, payment firms and crypto providers in every member state.

That rulebook is Regulation (EU) 2024/1624, the Anti-Money Laundering Regulation, which applies directly in every member state. Rowland described AMLA’s approach as a structural response to the fragmentation failures that Europe has seen. The authority has already finalised regulatory technical standards on its risk methodology and sent them to the European Commission for adoption.

Selection of the supervised groups focuses on systemic relevance and risk. Payment institutions and crypto-related firms can make the list, so fintech boards cannot assume that only traditional banks face direct scrutiny. AMLA repeats the selection every three years, which means a group that escapes the first round can still be chosen later.

Practitioners at the same conference stressed how much work remains on the ground. Tony Cahalan, head of the Financial Integrity Division at the Central Bank of Ireland, and Brian McKenzie, who leads anti-money laundering work at Citibank across 23 European countries, joined the debate on readiness. Banks must align customer checks, beneficial ownership records and suspicious transaction reporting with one set of obligations rather than 27 national variations, and the money laundering rules leave little room for local workarounds. Boards that treat July 2027 as a distant date risk discovering gaps only after AMLA starts asking questions.

Guidance will follow in stages. AMLA expects to issue guidelines on targeted financial sanctions in 2027, and national regulators and financial intelligence units will keep their roles alongside the new authority. Compliance teams that want to master the new money laundering rules should read the conference report next to the Regulation text to see where the timetable bites.

For banks, payment firms and crypto providers, the message from Frankfurt is plain: the money laundering rules arrive in July 2027, direct supervision follows in 2028, and firms that start gap analyses now will face the least disruption when AMLA opens its first files.