The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has called for much closer information sharing between governments, banks, virtual asset service providers and other private-sector firms, arguing that traditional anti-money laundering systems are struggling to keep pace with increasingly sophisticated cross-border financial crime.
84 Active Partnerships Worldwide
In a new report, Information Sharing to Combat Illicit Finance, the global AML standard setter identifies at least 84 active public-private partnerships across 51 jurisdictions. Approximately 58% of these operate under formal governance structures backed by legislation, memoranda of understanding or secure communication platforms. The remaining 42% rely on more flexible arrangements, including analyst-to-analyst collaboration, secure messaging channels, working groups and industry roundtables. Financial intelligence units lead roughly 63% of initiatives, while others are coordinated by multi-agency task forces or law enforcement.
More than three-quarters of reporting jurisdictions primarily share strategic intelligence such as fraud typologies, red flags and emerging risk patterns. Between 55% and 66% also exchange operational intelligence like suspicious transaction indicators, customer due diligence information and case-specific investigative data.
Fraud Is Driving a New Wave of Cooperation
The report highlights fraud as a rapidly growing threat that no single institution can combat alone. Criminal organizations now operate across multiple banks, payment providers, crypto platforms, telecom companies and digital marketplaces. The FATF recommends expanding information sharing beyond traditional financial institutions to include virtual asset service providers, telecom operators and online platforms that observe different parts of the criminal ecosystem.
FATF President Giles Thomson said: “Public-private partnerships are helping to achieve results that would not otherwise be possible with information on financial crime in fragmented siloes across public and private sectors. I encourage countries to use public-private partnerships to build the trust, collaboration, and high-speed channels for information sharing needed to counter increasingly sophisticated criminal methods.”
Measurable Enforcement Results
The report cites several examples of structured information sharing delivering real outcomes. Singapore’s Project FRONTIER+, a multinational anti-scam initiative involving 13 jurisdictions, led to more than 2,100 arrests, the freezing of over 36,000 bank accounts and the seizure of approximately S$28.2 million. In South Africa, cooperation between banks and authorities helped dismantle a pyramid scheme by analyzing suspicious customer activity, resulting in the freezing of 60 bank accounts containing over US$450,000. The UK saw bank-to-bank intelligence sharing uncover an underground banking network moving more than £10 million. Additional cases include human trafficking investigations in Latvia and terrorist financing detection in Indonesia.
Privacy Must Not Be Overlooked
Despite advocating broader information sharing, the FATF emphasizes that stronger cooperation cannot come at the expense of privacy or fundamental rights. Public-private partnerships should operate within clear legal frameworks governing necessity, proportionality, transparency, purpose limitation, data retention and access controls. The report recommends closer cooperation between AML authorities and national data protection regulators to ensure arrangements comply with domestic privacy laws while remaining operationally effective.
What It Means for Banks and Crypto Firms
The report signals that regulators increasingly expect institutions to contribute intelligence rather than simply satisfy reporting obligations. For crypto firms in particular, the report reinforces the FATF’s long-standing position that virtual asset service providers should become fully integrated into global AML information-sharing frameworks as digital assets become more embedded within the wider financial system. The FATF now presents public-private partnerships not as optional enhancements but as a critical component of modern financial crime prevention, arguing that governments and the private sector must exchange intelligence at the same speed that illicit funds move through the global financial system.