The FATF's Singapore presidency ran from 1 July 2022 to 30 June 2024 under T. Raja Kumar, and set four priorities: strengthening asset recovery, countering the illicit finance behind cyber-enabled crime, raising the effectiveness of national AML measures, and deepening work with the FATF-style regional bodies. Two produced changes to the standards themselves.
Key takeaways
- The presidency was a fixed two-year term, from 1 July 2022 to 30 June 2024, and it was the first Singaporean presidency of the FATF.
- Asset recovery moved from guidance into the Recommendations, the first revision of the FATF's asset recovery standards in the organisation's history.
- A FATF listing binds a firm only through national law. Regulation 33 of the UK's Money Laundering Regulations 2017 makes enhanced due diligence mandatory for call for action countries, which were the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Iran and Myanmar as at June 2026.
- Twenty-two jurisdictions were under increased monitoring after the 19 June 2026 plenary, and HM Treasury restated its high-risk list three days later.
- The effectiveness agenda is now visible in fifth-round mutual evaluations, starting with Singapore's own report published on 6 May 2026.
What were the four priorities of the FATF's Singapore presidency?
T. Raja Kumar held a fixed two-year term, from 1 July 2022 to 30 June 2024, as confirmed by Singapore's Ministry of Home Affairs when the appointment was announced. The presidency published an objectives paper at the start of the term, and each of its four workstreams produced an output that outlived the term.
| Priority | What it produced | What it means for a compliance team |
|---|---|---|
| Strengthening asset recovery | Revised asset recovery Recommendations and a strategic partnership with INTERPOL | Tracing and production requests arrive with tighter timeframes, and evidence has to be reconstructable |
| Countering illicit finance from cyber-enabled crime | A dedicated FATF report on the money laundering methods behind cyber-enabled fraud | Scam and mule typologies belong in monitoring scenarios, not only in the fraud team's rules |
| Increasing effectiveness of AML measures | Preparation of the fifth round of mutual evaluations, weighted towards outcomes | Assessors sample real files and ask what the control achieved, not whether a policy exists |
| Reinforcing partnerships with FSRBs | Capability and capacity work across the global network | Country risk scoring should record who assessed a jurisdiction, and when |
Presidency agendas are worth reading for one reason. The workstreams a president chooses tend to become the questions national assessors and supervisors ask three or four years later, which is roughly where we are now.
Why did asset recovery need a change to the FATF standards?
Confiscation had been the weakest joint in the framework for years. Guidance cannot create a legal power that a national court does not already have, so the presidency pushed the change into the Recommendations rather than into a best-practice paper. The FATF Annual Report 2022 to 2023 records the revision of the asset recovery standards as a first in the organisation's history, alongside a strategic partnership with INTERPOL to support operational application.
Singapore applied the same agenda at home. Its National Asset Recovery Strategy, published on 26 June 2024, four days before the presidency closed, sets out four pillars: detect, deprive, deliver and deter.
For a regulated firm, the burden of an asset recovery agenda lands at the response end rather than the onboarding end. Recovery depends on how quickly an institution can reconstruct a payment chain, produce the customer file that existed at the time, and act on a freezing order. Programmes that retain screening outcomes but not the underlying match evidence tend to fail at exactly this point.
What did the cyber-enabled fraud work change for monitoring teams?
The presidency's second priority produced FATF analysis of cyber-enabled fraud and the laundering methods that move its proceeds. The operational point for compliance teams is that proceeds of scams and online fraud do not behave like proceeds of traditional predicate offences. They arrive in small amounts, across many accounts, and leave through mule networks, remittance corridors and virtual asset service providers within hours.
That breaks two common assumptions in older rule sets. Value thresholds calibrated to drug or corruption proceeds will not fire on a scam network, and monthly batch review is slower than the laundering cycle it is meant to detect. Scenario libraries need mule indicators, rapid pass-through detection and beneficiary-level linking.
Singapore's answer was structural. MAS launched COSMIC on 1 April 2024, a platform through which financial institutions share information about customers exhibiting multiple red flags once defined thresholds are met, described on its anti-money laundering pages. Firms outside such a scheme have to close the same gap internally, which usually means joining fraud and AML data in one transaction monitoring layer.
How does a FATF listing actually bind a compliance programme?
The FATF is not a regulator and its lists are not self-executing. They acquire legal force when a national instrument refers to them, and the two lists do not carry the same weight. Confusing them is a recurring audit finding, because the call for action list generally creates a hard obligation while increased monitoring generally creates a risk-assessment duty.
| Regime | Instrument | How a FATF listing takes effect |
|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom | Money Laundering Regulations 2017, regulation 33 | Enhanced due diligence is mandatory for a person established in a FATF call for action country, including source of funds, source of wealth and senior management approval |
| United States | 31 CFR 1010.610(c) | Enhanced due diligence is required on a correspondent account for a foreign bank licensed in a country designated non-cooperative by an intergovernmental body of which the US is a member, or subject to special measures |
| Singapore | MAS AML/CFT Notices under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2022 | MAS issues a FATF statement after each plenary; failure to comply with a Notice carries a fine of up to S$1 million per offence, plus S$100,000 for each day a continuing offence persists |
HM Treasury restates the FATF lists as UK high-risk third countries by advisory notice, last updated on 22 June 2026. Your country risk model should read from that national instrument, not from a screenshot of a FATF press release.
Which jurisdictions were on the FATF lists as at June 2026?
Three jurisdictions were subject to the call for action as at June 2026: the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Iran and Myanmar. Myanmar joined that list at the October 2022 plenary, the first of the Singapore presidency, and remains there. HM Treasury's June 2026 notice lists twenty-two jurisdictions under increased monitoring, matching the FATF statement of 19 June 2026.
| Change at the 19 June 2026 plenary | Jurisdictions |
|---|---|
| Added to increased monitoring | Iraq, Bosnia and Herzegovina |
| Removed from increased monitoring | Algeria, Namibia |
| Remaining on call for action | Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Iran, Myanmar |
A removal creates as much work as an addition. Country scores change, previously mandatory enhanced measures become discretionary, and any customer re-rated on the strength of a listing needs a documented decision on the way back down. MemberCheck rescreens the existing book against the revised lists rather than waiting for the next periodic review, which is what makes those decisions auditable. See our jurisdiction risk page and are you concerned about the FATF blacklist?
What did the effectiveness agenda become in the fifth round of mutual evaluations?
The third priority was the least visible at the time and has aged into the most consequential. The presidency prepared the next round of assessments, and the FATF Annual Report 2023 to 2024 treats that preparation as a headline outcome of its second year. Singapore was then among the first countries assessed under the new round.
The FATF published its peer evaluation of Singapore on 6 May 2026. MAS reported that the assessment placed Singapore on regular follow-up, the process used for members that have done well, an improvement on its 2016 fourth-round result even though the standards had tightened in the interim.
Two findings in that report indicate where fifth-round assessors probe. They asked about proliferation financing risk awareness in sectors not traditionally covered by FATF obligations, and about risk mitigation for foreign legal persons and foreign legal arrangements. Both are effectiveness questions rather than technical compliance questions, and neither is answerable from a policy document. Our explainer on FATF mutual evaluations sets out what an assessment team samples.
What did reinforcing the regional bodies achieve in practice?
The FATF's own membership is small, but its standards reach far more countries through the FATF-style regional bodies, which conduct most assessments outside the core membership. Singapore is an active FATF member and a founding member of the Asia/Pacific Group on Money Laundering, as MAS sets out on its anti-money laundering pages. The fourth priority was capability and capacity work across that wider network.
This matters more than it sounds for correspondent banking and cross-border customers. Most jurisdictions that end up under increased monitoring are assessed by a regional body, and the quality and recency of that assessment shapes how much weight a firm can put on it.
A practical test for your own country risk methodology: for each jurisdiction where you hold material exposure, can you name the assessing body, the year of the last mutual evaluation, and the follow-up status? If the answer is a single risk score with no provenance, the methodology will not survive a supervisory review. Our country coverage pages set out the list-level position by jurisdiction.
Which parts of the Singapore agenda are still live in 2026?
Three strands from that term are still generating work. Payment transparency has moved on: revisions to Recommendation 16 were agreed in June 2025, with global implementation expected by the end of 2030, so cross-border payment data quality is a multi-year programme rather than a project. The FATF Recommendations remain the authoritative text.
Sanctions implementation has also shifted. Recommendation 6 was updated at the June 2026 plenary so that targeted financial sanctions regimes do not obstruct humanitarian flows, per the plenary outcomes. Screening configurations that block payments on jurisdiction alone will produce more false positives against that direction of travel.
Beneficial ownership transparency is the third, and it remains the most common source of findings. See our analysis of the FATF report on beneficial ownership, our guide to the travel rule, and further reading under jurisdictions and regulation.
