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Global Fincrime Operations Trends in 2025
Global Fincrime Operations Trends in 2025
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Respondents for our survey were representatives of financial institutions, split betweeninvestment banks, commercial banks, corporate banks, asset managers, and assetservicers. Our survey covered three key economies - the UK, the US, and Singapore - with responses from 600 senior decision-makers working in risk, compliance, and operations roles.
Tackling financial crime has become the number one priority for AI investment in 2025, as financial institutions (FIs) seek to mitigate the threat of increasingly sophisticated crime and tightening regulations.
This reflects the global trend of rising sanctions measures triggered by geopolitical tensions and firms are under pressure to bolster systems and processes to remain compliant.
In a recent study of UK and US FIs by Fenergo in collaboration with Chartis Research, 47% are already using AI in compliance operations and six percent are using agentic AI.
In this survey, most firms reported that their staff are using some form of AI to automate labor-intensive AML/KYC processes.
FIs complete tens of thousands of periodic reviews on average per year to keep on top of financial crime risk and client risk profile changes. This emphasizes the scale of the periodic review workload weighing on a large proportion of FIs today.
Our research shows that financial institutions are spending tens, even hundreds of millions on average on financial crime operations, yet lingering inefficiencies in client onboarding are driving clients away.
Across the three economies we studied, the number of FIs report losing clients due to slow onboarding processes rose slightly from the 63% reported across sectors in 2024, and way above the 2023 average of 48%.
Financial institutions globally are spending large sums of money on KYC/AML activities. Much of this cost is attributed to antiquated and manual systems and ways of working that frustrate employees and clients alike.
According to a report by McKinsey, banks typically assign 10-15% of their total full-time workforce to KYC and AML alone.
When it comes to technology adoption within compliance, the most common set up is the in-house model, with more than a third opting to fully build and maintain solutions in-house.
Firms that either use a business process management (BPM) solution, rely on in-house, or adopt a hybrid approach cite high maintenance costs, complexity of use, and regulatory adaptability as key challenges. Only one percent of these firms globally reported no tech stack challenges.
In this groundbreaking report, Fenergo and Chartis Research explore the emergence of Agentic AI—autonomous, goal-driven AI systems—and intelligent automation as key enablers of scalable, proactive compliance.
This global research report of over 450 C-suite execs at corporate & institutional banks and commercial banks investigates KYC functions in 2024.
