14 Sep EU tightens up the anti-money laundering measures. What is Romania doing.
Press release
September 14, 2026
EU tightens up the anti-money laundering measures. What is Romania doing.
The value of fines for money laundering in 2025 by authorities around the globe topped the 4 billion USD threshold, with banks ending up paying some 56% of this amount as the spotlight is intensifying on digital assets.
But if you think of “money laundering” as a movie-like scene with cases with cash, patterns shifted into digital. Penalties against crypto and digital asset firms jumped 56% year-on-year, reaching over a 1 billion USD.
Meanwhile, processes such as Know Your Client (KYC) and Customer Due Diligence (CDD) have been refined and intensified, especially after several failures involving Politically Exposed People (PEP), which is the definition of individuals entrusted with a prominent public function who carry a higher risk for potential bribery, corruption, or money laundering.
This category alone includes government officials (heads of state, senior politicians, cabinet ministers, high-ranking judges, and senior military officers), public sector leaders (senior executives or board members of state-owned corporations and central banks), international functionaries (high-ranking officials or board members working in international and intergovernmental organizations), and family and associates (immediate family members and close business or personal associates linked to a PEP) (source).
The European Parliament established in May 2024 the Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA), for ensuring the efficient and adequate supervision of obliged entities that pose a high-risk regarding money laundering/terrorist financing. (link to EU bill)
By the end of September, AMLA is expected to issue the first provisional list of entities under direct supervision, while the final list of approximately 40 selected entities will be communicated by the end of 2027, ahead of direct supervision officially beginning in 2028. Thus, currently there is no public list of Romanian banks (or other obliged entities) selected for direct supervision by AMLA, neither for Romania nor for other EU member states.
AMLA will select the entities for direct supervision based on multiple criteria, such as operations of credit/financial institutions across at least 6 member states, with over 20,000 resident customers, or over 50 million euro in total annual customer transactions.
As the deadline for transposing into the national legislation of the Anti-Money Laundering directive is July 10, 2027, Romania has already amended the legislation accordingly, like (as an example) amending and supplementing Law No. 129/2019 on the prevention and combating of money laundering and terrorist financing, as well as amending and supplementing certain normative acts.
As anti-money laundering regulations become increasingly stringent across Europe, financial institutions need access to reliable, up-to-date, and actionable information to strengthen their customer due diligence processes. ICAP CRIF supports banks and other regulated entities with data, analytics, and compliance solutions that help them identify risks more effectively, improve onboarding processes, and meet evolving regulatory requirements with confidence.
ICAP CRIF is part of the CRIF group, the market leader in credit risk solutions and business intelligence in South-Eastern Europe, which provides integrated expertise in the markets of Greece, Romania, Bulgaria and Cyprus.
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