The intergovernmental body that sets the global standards for anti-money-laundering, counter-financing of terrorism and counter-proliferation financing.
The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) is the intergovernmental standard-setter for the global fight against money laundering, the financing of terrorism and the financing of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Established by the G7 in 1989 and headquartered in Paris, it is hosted by the OECD but operates as an independent task force with its own membership and plenary.
The FATF's central output is its 40 Recommendations, the global blueprint against which national AML/CFT regimes are measured. They cover the criminalisation of money laundering and terrorism financing, customer due diligence, record-keeping, suspicious- transaction reporting, supervisory powers, international cooperation and the regulation of designated non-financial businesses and professions.
Each Recommendation is accompanied by detailed Interpretive Notes; together they form the technical baseline that countries are expected to transpose into national law and that supervisors are expected to enforce in practice.
Countries are assessed against the Recommendations through mutual evaluations — peer reviews carried out every 8–10 years that grade both the technical compliance of national rules and the effectiveness of their actual implementation. Results below threshold can place a jurisdiction on the FATF's "jurisdictions under increased monitoring" ("grey list") or — in extreme cases — on the "high-risk jurisdictions subject to a call for action" ("black list"), with material consequences for cross-border finance, correspondent banking and access to capital markets.
The global reach of the Recommendations is operationalised through nine FATF-Style Regional Bodies (FSRBs) — for example MONEYVAL in Europe, GAFILAT in Latin America, APG in Asia–Pacific. FSRB members commit to the FATF standards and run their own peer-review cycles in coordination with the FATF Secretariat.
The EU's AML/CFT framework — AMLD 6, the AML Regulation (AMLR) and the new EU AML Authority (AMLA) — is anchored explicitly in the FATF Recommendations. EU supervisors and national FIUs use FATF typologies and risk categories as the working vocabulary of financial-crime detection, and EU institutions participate in the FATF as a single delegation alongside their member states.
Silbad's defence platforms are designed to fit FATF-aligned regimes — Bucephalus' AML and transaction-monitoring scenarios, Marengo's market-abuse and SFMA detection, and Chetak's forensic timeline reconstruction all carry FATF typology coverage as a baseline.
