Eurofi Financial Forum, Dublin

We were at the Eurofi Financial Forum in Dublin, the conference that brings together EU finance ministries, central banks, supervisory authorities and the financial industry ahead of the informal ECOFIN meeting. AMLA and the European Commission were both on the agenda, including a working session on moving the new AML framework from policy into action.

The session that mattered most to us was the closing one: "AML and AMLA: from policy into action." AMLA Executive Board Member Derville Rowland sat with national supervisors and compliance leads from banking and payments.

Much of it came back to the calendar. The single rulebook applies from 2027. AMLA's direct supervision of selected obligated entities follows from 2028. Everything between now and 2030 is about whether supervision across 27 member states converges in practice or only on paper.

Two threads ran through the discussion. The first was methodology: risk assessment still differs by jurisdiction, which makes a genuinely common, risk-based approach to supervision harder to reach than the shared rulebook suggests. The second was technology, and specifically how far analytics and AI can sit in the decision chain before explainability becomes the limiting factor — a question the supervisors in the room and the compliance teams facing them approached from noticeably different angles.

Between sessions, most of our conversations were with compliance and payments teams from across the region working through the same practical timeline. Dublin was a good place to hear how differently that work is progressing from one market to the next.