The Future of Financial Intelligence Sharing (FFIS) has warned that G20-led plans to reform cross-border payments by 2027 threatens to enable fraud and money laundering and remove a fundamental part of existing processes for ensuring economic crime security.

Two new papers of a planned four by the research programme pointed out that while fraud is a highly prevalent and pervasive crime type among all G20 countries, minimisation and mitigation of fraud risk and associated money laundering, “does not feature in the G20 roadmap at any point”.

FFIS added that the roadmap does not explore opportunities to enhance economic crime detection effectiveness “to any degree”.

Endorsed by G20 leaders in 2020, in October 2023 the Financial Stability Board (FSB) said it had moved into the next phase of its roadmap for actions to make improvements in the speed, cost, accessibility and transparency of payments across borders.

Focus areas of the roadmap span the enhancement of payment system interoperability, legal, regulatory and supervisory frameworks, and data exchange and messaging standards.

“As a whole, the current G20 roadmap targets, priority themes and actions appear insufficient to enable a mandate for economic crime security analysis,” wrote the paper’s author Nick Maxwell, head of the FFIS research programme.

The paper continued: “Given the fragmentation of regulatory regimes across payments, anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing, sanctions and fraud domains, there will need to be coordination between supervisors to ensure that the appropriate balances are achieved in the governance framework for access to payment infrastructure.”

The paper went on to advise that ongoing regulatory coordination and engagement would be required to ensure that relevant risks are being managed on an ongoing basis from the perspective of payments efficiency, consumer protection, data protection, competition law and economic crime security considerations.

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