Navigating the UK's Economic Crime Response - with UK Finance

2026 is a turning point for economic crime regulation in the UK. In this episode, Kathryn Westmore, Director of Financial Crime for UK Finance joins our Head of Regulation and Policy Katarina Pranjic to discuss how the UK’s economic crime framework is evolving following the conclusion of the Economic Crime Plan 2023–2026. They cover how anti‑corruption, fraud, AML and sanctions are being addressed through a more joined‑up approach, and what this means in practice for risk and compliance teams.

This episode aims to help listeners cut through the volume of regulatory change, understand the strategic direction behind it, and understand the steps they need to take to future-proof their compliance strategies.

Learn more about UK Finance here.

Download the LexisNexis Risk Solutions Sanctions Pulse here.

DISCLAIMER: The information provided in this podcast is for informational purposes only and is not intended to and shall not be used as legal advice.  The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of LexisNexis Risk Solutions. LexisNexis Risk Solutions does not warrant that the information provided in this podcast is accurate or error-free.

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

Katarina Pranjic 0:12

Welcome to the RegTech Pulse podcast, where industry experts discuss the latest trends in financial crime compliance. I'm your host, Katarina Pranjic, and I'm delighted to be joined by Kathryn Westmore, Financial Crime Director at UK Finance, to discuss the UK's economic crime response. Kathryn, thank you so much for joining. Before we start, could you introduce yourself and the work of the UK Finance, please?

Kathryn Westmore 0:35

Yeah, absolutely. And hi, Kat, thank you very much for having me. Delighted to be here. So, as you said, I'm the director of financial crime at UK Finance. I joined UK Finance earlier this year and spent the four years before that at the Centre for Finance and Security at the Royal United Services Institute, where I led all of our research on financial crime there. For people who are not aware of UK Finance, so we are a trade industry body that represents the banking and the finance sectors. So we represent the views of 300 odd of our members, including engaging with government regulators, law enforcement, and other stakeholders, particularly on the economic crime, financial crime agenda. Thank you.

The UK’s Policy Wave Explained

Katarina Pranjic 1:11

So let's set the scene because I think the sheer volume of what has landed in the past 12 months or so is genuine extraordinary and uh even for the standards of this sector. And I want to make sure that listeners appreciate that none of this is happening in isolation. So in March this year, the Home Office published a fraud strategy that is a serious document, over 250 million of government investments over the three years, structured around three pillars Disrupt, Safeguard, and Respond. And there is a new 31 million online crime center launching in April to bring together law enforcement, intelligence agencies, banks, mobile networks, and tech firms in one place. That is a genuinely new capability, and it's not a standalone event, I would say. If you zoom out, fraud is just one threat. Simultaneously, we had Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency ACTA, which is now live in a meaningful way, including the failure to prevent fraud offense that came into force in September 2025 for large organizations. Then we had the anti-corruption strategy in 2025 published in December last year, with 123 comments and a very direct message that corruption is now being treated as a national security threat, not merely regulatory risk. We have a complete overhaul of the UK's new ML supervisory architecture with the FCA set to become the sole professional services supervisor, consolidating oversight from 22 separate professional body supervisors. We had ongoing GMLSG revisions, we have updated FCA guidance on the treatment of domestic pets. We had a GM Treasury guidance on how digital identity verification fits the CDD obligations, consolidation of sanction lists, all those threat assessments being published by OFSI, obviously companies house reform and mandatory identification verification for existing directors. And across the channel, EU is implementing the full AML package, the ML regulation, the 6 AML directive, the AMLA, the new EU authority, which begins supervision quite soon, and EI does to introducing interoperable digital identity wallets across member states. So honest question is can anyone actually keep track of all of this? And more importantly, our firms building frameworks that can absorb it. So, Kathryn, to you. So let's start with that big picture. The UK had economic crime plans before, but something feels qualitatively different about the current moment. Maybe we can start from the economic crime plan too and what it's actually seeking to achieve and why is 2026 such a pivotal year for delivery.

Economic Crime Plan Origins And 2026

Kathryn Westmore 3:44

Yeah, absolutely. And that was an exhaustive list of everything that's uh that's gone on. I would actually maybe wind back in time a few years actually, back to the last mutual evaluation of the UK by the Financial Action Task Force or FATF in 2018. Following that evaluation, which was broadly positive, there were a number of areas where the UK really needed to address the recommendations of FATF and demonstrate progress. And those formed the basis of what then became the first economic crime plan, which ran from 2019 to 2022. I think what was really important about that, and which has set the tone for a lot of the work since is that it was a public-private document with a large number of actions across a range of different areas, but it was very, very firmly owned by both the public sector and the private sector. Obviously, that expired in 2022 when we also saw the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia, which really changed, I think, the context in which we were all operating. Obviously, from a sanctions perspective, clearly, sanctions suddenly became a really significant issue. But more broadly, I think it gave a lot of impetus to dealing with long-standing issues such as Companies House, which had long been bugbears of many of us working in the system, but where there hadn't really been that drive to address some of the issues. So following the conclusion of the first economic crime plan, it was replaced by the second economic crime plan, which ran from 2023 until this year. And that again contained a huge number of actions across a range of different disciplines around money laundering, fraud, asset recovery, included the development of the anti-corruption strategy as well. Huge amount of work that's gone into that as well. Um, and I think some really kind of sizable items that have come out of it. So you mentioned supervisory reform. That was one of the commitments under ECP2. Clearly, we are not implementing supervisory reform yet. We're in early stages, but actually to have that decision made was such a significant turning point, I think, in the UK. But obviously, just because we've come to the end of ECP2 doesn't mean we've fixed economic crime at all. And you mentioned the anti-corruption strategy, the fraud strategy, or anticipating an anti-money laundering strategy coming out over the summer. Yeah, there's a huge number of international developments. I mean, you reference what's happening at the EU, which is obviously for any firms operating cross-border a really significant issue. And this issue of kind of regulatory divergence, I think, is going to become a real top concern over the next few years. But you've also got a number of other international developments, let's say. So we've got the UK-hosted illicit finance summit coming up this year. From the 1st of July, the UK will hold the presidency of the FATF. We've got the UK's presidency of the G20 coming up towards the end of this year. And the UK is really going to be at the forefront of the international dialogue on some of these issues, I think, particularly around the effectiveness agenda. And now when I think when you look at a lot of the work that's gone on, a lot of the things that you reference, particularly from the UK perspective, digital identity guidance, changes to the money laundering regulations, the supervisory framework, a lot of that is very much rooted in this effectiveness piece, which sort of comes from a FATF level right down to how we operate on a day-to-day basis. But there's a lot there, right? There's a lot for firms to get their head round. A lot of the ways in which we hope that these actions and these strategies and the plans all coordinated, but there is a lot for us all to, and that's policymakers, law enforcement. There's just a huge amount of change. I think it makes it really a difficult operating environment, but it also gives firms a lot of opportunities to think about how they can do things a bit differently. That's a great

Coordinating Multiple Strategies And Leadership

Katarina Pranjic 7:21

point. It really strikes me that, you know, now that we have multiple strategies running simultaneously under the what we call and would describe as economic crime umbrella, like the fraud strategy, anti-corruption strategy, AML and asset recovery expected strategy. From a regulatory intelligence perspective, that is enormously complex for firms to track. As you said, it can be a challenge. So each one has its own timeline, its own lead agency, its own set of obligations. But the government's framing in that is that, you know, they're deliberately interconnected, which they are. So do you think the joined up narrative is lending with the industry? Are they able to interconnect all of that?

Kathryn Westmore 8:00

I think yes, to some extent, is probably my answer. I think what we've really learned from ECP1 and ECP2 is the importance of a couple of things. The first is the need for kind of really clearly defined, like high-level objectives or principles that underpin the policymaking, uh, which can drive all parts of the system in the right direction and provide that strategic direction. And I think, particularly in the context we're operating now where we have some strategies, we're expecting more strategies. I think bringing those all together with those kind of principles, I think is really important, which I think also links to the other point that we've learned, I think, from ECP1 and ECP2, which is the importance of system leadership. You mentioned how long some of these strategies are. There are so many actions in them, partly because of the timing, the way things have been developed. Actions that you would expect to find in one strategy are actually sitting in another strategy sometime. And I think that demonstrates the importance of a kind of system where there is clear leadership to coordinate all of these actions. And even going beyond that, when you look at some of the key enablers across anti-corruption, across fraud, across anti-money laundering, counter-terrorist financing, we come back to some of the same key themes: data sharing, public-private partnership, reform to the criminal justice system. All of these things are relevant to all the different strategies that people are looking at. So it's really important that those activities are coordinated and joined up. And I know certainly from a UK Finance position and talking to a number of our members, there is this real desire to have this kind of clear system leadership and clear, high-level, overarching principles that ensure that all of the great activity that's going on, whether that's public or private sector, is brought together and that there is some degree of oversight of everything so that things aren't happening in isolation.

Katarina Pranjic 9:57

No, 100%. It doesn't happen in the real world, right? Criminal states don't operate in silence. So I would definitely agree

Anti-Corruption Returns As National Security

Katarina Pranjic 10:04

with you. You know, we mentioned a couple of times, and I want to talk about something that I personally think has been underappreciated so for some time. It's anti-bribery and corruption. And it's now seems like it's back on the top of the agenda. And I mean genuinely back, not just as a line in a strategy document. I really like that document, the strategy. The strategy is notable to me for several reasons. Besides the NCAA estimates that over 100 billion could be laundered through the UK every year, frames corruption explicitly as a threat to national security and economic growth. And it calls out sectors that have historically not uh themselves as corruption, uh, been seen as corruption exposed, like construction infrastructure, public procurement, uh, local government, professional football, with the new independent football regulator being tasked with uh strengthening anti-corruption capabilities. There's also a focus on professional enablers, which is a category that now includes lawyers, accountants, and bankers. I don't think any of this is like groundbreaking new, but do you think corruption has moved up to the agenda so sharply right now? And uh what does that mean for financial institutions who have tended to treat it as a separate risk stream from the fraud or AML?

Kathryn Westmore 11:22

Yeah, I think you're totally right. I mean, you've you've been in this game as long as I have here. We've seen the kind of waves of interest in the ABC agenda. You know, we obviously saw back when the Bribery Act was implemented back in 2010. You know, a huge amount of focus on it then, and then interest wanes, and then you get big cases in the news, then all of a sudden the interest peaks again. And I totally agree that it does seem to be pretty high on the agenda. Uh, I think that's probably for a couple of reasons. I think it's probably still a sort of legacy of what we've seen post the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the focus on the kind of kleptocracy and oligarchs there, and the acknowledgement of how sort of interlinked corruption was with some of that behaviour that we saw, um, and the link between, you know, corruption and sanctions of Asian, for example. So I think there is a very sort of real and tangible way in which some of the issues around bribery and corruption have manifested themselves that put it high on the agenda. But I think broadly, there's probably a greater recognition, I think we'll kind of talk about this in a bit more detail, um, around that bribery and corruption itself does not happen in a silo, as you said. So when you look at kind of economic crime, financial crime, illicit finance more broadly, corruption is often key in facilitating those kind of financial flows. And that could be as simple as corruption at the borders to allow people to courier large quantities of cash between jurisdictions. That is a corruption issue. That's a bribery issue there. And a lot of the criminal activity that we see, whether it's transnational organized crime, whether it's the industrialization of fraud and the scam centers, corruption underpins a lot of that activity. And I think there's a really good graphic in the anti-corruption strategy, which I will not do a very good job of explaining, but with pointlessness to page 27 of the strategy, where it kind of sets out where you have an individual and what they're seeking to achieve and whether that's to hide their wealth, protect their wealth, seek influence or appear to kind of be legitimized and the techniques that they might use. So that could be buying real estate, it could be making influential friends in high places, and all the various sectors who can provide those services or can help in. And you mentioned professional enablers, but obviously it goes kind of broader than that. And there's a whole range of different actors that can be pulled into this kind of corrupt ecosystem as well. And I think that recognition that bribery and corruption, it's not just about companies in high-risk sectors bribing public officials overseas to win contracts. Yes, that is still a hugely significant issue. And when we look at kind of SFO prosecutions, that's clearly a real issue. But it's actually much broader than that. And that's what I think the anti-corruption strategy does a good job of, which is kind of articulating the different ways and the different mechanisms by which bribery and corruption are kind of undermining society, the rule of law, prosperity, national security. 100%.

Katarina Pranjic 14:29

You're so right. Corruption proceeds pass through the same financial system and they're often using the same structures, the same jurisdictions, same professional services gatekeeper. So if you're a compliance professional who has been treating ABC as a separate work stream to AML, the regulatory direction, I think, is uh direction of travel is very clear, telling us that those walls need to come down, right? Which brings me naturally to the question of convergence.

Converging Risks And Networked Crime

Katarina Pranjic 14:56

There is something I feel quite strongly about. So fraud, AML sanctions, and corruption are increasingly being treated by regulators and government as a part of the same ecosystem. The criminal does not operate in silence, as I said. And you know, so why do our compliance frameworks? And let me put some numbers on the table. LexisNexis Risk Solutions data shows that the net designations to UK sanction lists increase by 175% year on year in 2025. It's an amazing document if our listeners would like to read. It's called the Sanctions Pulse. Lots of different stats in there. Then the NCA estimated that over 100 billion is laundered through the UK annually. Fraud remains the single most reported crime in England and Wales. These are not separate phenomena, they're interconnected risk vectors. So, what are you seeing from UK Finance members in terms of how they're structuring their response to this convergence?

Kathryn Westmore 15:50

Yeah, it is such a key shape about that thing about criminal operating silence, but it's totally true. And I think we see, and you can see in press reporting, some of these big transnational networks are moving money on a huge scale. And they're facilitating sanctions evasion, they're laundering the proceeds from scam centers, they're moving large quantities of cash, they're laundering the proceeds of drug dealing on the streets. In some ways, they are kind of predicate agnostic. As you said, exactly these same techniques. So moving the proceeds of corruption, they're moving the proceeds of fraud, they're moving the proceeds of sanctions evasion. And there's you know some great cases. I'm sure listeners will be familiar with the NCA's operation destabilize the sort of activity in December 2024 and some further activity at the end of last year, targeting a Russian-speaking money laundering network operating in the UK and other jurisdictions. And yeah, they were engaged in ransomware, they were engaged in kind of over-the-counter cash-to-crypto swaps. And they were providing services to Russian oligarchs who were looking to move money to get around sanctions. So we have to start kind of treating these networks as what they are, kind of networks of different individuals, groups, but all working together to move money around. And we can't look at it as a sanctions evasion issue or a fraud issue or a money laundering issue because it's not one of those, it doesn't sit neat in that categorization. And I think certainly when we talk to some of our members around some of the kind of complicated investigations that they're doing, you know, they're uncovering really significant networks in probably cash controllers and money mules and this and this and this. There are loads of different parts from it. And whilst I would hate to use the term kind of FRAML, you know, there definitely seems to be that greater awareness that even if you need to manage the risks slightly differently from a controls perspective, when it comes to the intelligence, the investigations, that really needs to be brought together so that you identify all part of the picture. Obviously, again, when you're talking about a single institution, they will only ever see a slice of the action, which is when you kind of come back to then how are these risks and threats managed in a broader sort of ecosystem context? How can we better use data sharing and intelligence sharing to build up that picture of these networks that are operating, that are facilitating all of this kind of criminality? And therefore, how do we have the most disruptive impact on them? Which also means, I think, adjusting what kind of success looks like and what those kind of metrics look like. A stat that I've often used, thanks to the NCA in Operation Destabilize is the fact that when the Russian-speaking money laundering network became aware of law enforcement interest in them and cash careers were kind of getting picked up off the street, the prices that they charged to organize crime groups to launder money increased. So their kind of commission rate increased, and the NCAA could track that change. And so what that disruptive activity did is not just arrested people, you know, we led to sanctions, et cetera, but it made it more expensive for criminals to launder money. So where they were getting, you know, charged 3% fees for the kind of professional money laundering services, it was 5%. And that that adds up, right? That making it more expensive, if criminals are profiting less, they either have to take more risks to keep their kind of profit margins alive, take the hit, um, or do things which might open expose them to greater law enforcement attention, whatever. So actually, measuring success might come in a slightly different way if we're treating this as a sort of networked operation that we're trying to disrupt rather than kind of pick off individual notes.

Katarina Pranjic 19:51

That is fascinating, Catherine. I love it. I feel like that could be a documentary episode itself, probably. It's an interesting perspective. We don't really often talk about it that way. You observe the regulation, obviously. We talk about its effectiveness, is it working? But, you know, there always I feel similar angles that we look at from and seeing from in what you were just saying is to me is fascinating, you know, the impact it can have on criminals as well. Brilliant. So I think many firms they build their compliance functions along product lines and risk type lines, and rewriting that is not going to be quick. But when you touched on the effectiveness, I think you nailed it there because this is the one that I think the industry has to be honest about. That we're always asking the same question: is it working? We have more regulations, more obligations, more designations, more reporting requirements. Um, but are we actually recovering the assets? And I think it's a good time for us just to mention the asset recovery strategy. Just for the listeners that might be interested, we are expecting that third strategy. Do you got any insights for us, you know, in terms of when can we expect that to be published? And is it really going to be a game changer when it comes to asset recovery?

Measuring Disruption Beyond Arrests

Katarina Pranjic 20:58

What are the expectations in the industry?

Kathryn Westmore 21:00

Yeah, I can answer the easier question first, which is I think we're still anticipating it to be out by the summer, and that's driven by a lot of reasons. But I think I would hope before we go into the sort of summer break, we should have anti-money on joining asset recovery strategy, which I think we certainly would welcome, particularly with the ending of ECP2. We certainly need something, not least when you consider that we've got FATF assessors coming to do the onsite of the UK next summer. Clearly, we need to have something in place there. In terms of your kind of specific question on asset recovery, I mean, it's uh it's a difficult area and it's been such a huge focus. I mean, it's been a focus under FATF. Um, it's been a focus from the UK perspective. Obviously, there are significant upsides on all sides in improving asset recovery response, whether that's returning money to victims, um, repatriating funds to communities that have been devastated by corruption, but also whether it's um frankly creating schemes such as we have at the moment where you get a portion of the funds that are recovered invested back into the response, right? Like that's a great source of income for law enforcement as well. So there's huge upsides to improving asset recovery. It is tricky. I mean, there is the you know that oft-quoted stat about how how little, you know, or how few assets are actually recovered. And certainly, while we've seen some areas of progress in the UK, I think we probably haven't gone as far as fast as we might want to go on asset recovery. So I think it will be really interesting to see how the strategy looks to address it. I think that's against a backdrop of an illicit finance summit hosted this year, where we expect asset recovery or certainly criminal wealth to be a key element of that, both in terms of looking at how it manifests through the kind of priority thematic areas that the government have identified for that summit of gold and property and crypto, but also more broadly around how can we move forward as a global community? And indeed, what's the UK's role in implementing some of the uh recommendations we've seen coming out at a FATF level about asset recovery? So non-conviction-based asset recovery, for example, civil forfeiture. I think that's a huge opportunity there from an asset recovery side. Um, it's about building the right tools. And, you know, so much of the asset recovery

Asset Recovery Strategy Expectations

Kathryn Westmore 23:31

piece comes down to the international collaboration aspect of it as well. So mutual legal assistance, information sharing, MOUs, all of that stuff. Where we're making good progress, but there are still some significant barriers as well. So I think there's a lot of good and interesting and quite novel thinking uh that I've heard from different quarters around asset recovery, um, the role of law enforcement and how we can speed up the processes, etc. So I think it's a watch the space when we see that draft in July. We can I'm sure we can have a further conversation about asset recovery, but it is clearly something that is not working as well as it needs to work fundamentally.

Katarina Pranjic 24:14

Oh, we just might, you know, in July we can come back to this one. I don't know. I feel quite excited about it and um I look forward to see what's in there. It's such an important part of economic crime response. So yeah, let's see what happens. Well, I'll try to wrap it now and go to the last bit, but um, equally important. So I wanted to turn it to something that I think is undervalued. It's in public discussion. The role of industry is actually shaping the regulatory response now, rather than simply reacting to it. I feel that collaboration really changed, you know, Lexis Nexis Risk Solutions, we engage directly with regulators and policymakers and industry throughout the consultations or, you know, different working groups. And it's amazing, you know, because we see a change, we see that conversations being a lot more meaningful. Um, we collaborate on so many different levels. But, you know, UK Finance does similar work throughout the working groups and you know, you connect the whole of the industry. And I know your team engages across the very wide range of policy processes as well. Can you talk about how the engagement works in practice and why it doesn't matter, especially now, considering all the reg changes that we just touched on?

Kathryn Westmore 25:21

Well, quite unsurprisingly, I'm going to say that industry engagement is absolutely vital, whether that's through UK finance or other forms. But fundamentally, policymaking in an ivory tower doesn't work. It's only when you actually engage with the people whose job it is to operationalize the policy that you can really appreciate the downstream implications, which will not be the same for all firms. UK finance, we speak on behalf of our members, but we also realise that we have a wide variety of members with different requirements, different products, different services, different capabilities. And the impact of policy change on them is going to look very different. It's a very different if you have a large globally operating bank versus a small UK-focused wealth management firm. And when there are policy changes, and you know, we talk about the statutory instrument uh to the MLRs, for example, that contains a lot of things that we collectively of an industry have long argued for, but we also need to show that there is an actual benefit to these things, you know, to these changes that we've really been advocating for. We need to show that we can now kind of take them and operationalize them and that it actually leads to kind of greater effectiveness. And I think even now, after kind of all the consultations on the money laundry searching instrument, you know, the various different consultation processes that are fed into that, the engagement that everybody's had, we're still uncovering little knotty issues from practitioners, from kind of first-line people who are saying, right, like how do I translate this into my processes and my controls? And actually flagging things that people haven't thought about just because it might be a timing issue, or it might be an actually, well, how does this work with this piece of legislation? Um, how do we get to the right level of comfort where we're having to make more judgment-based decisions when it comes to some of these things? So I think good policy making needs to be rooted in that kind of operational

Why Industry Input Shapes Better Policy

Speaker 27:22

dimension, which is not to say that policy making should be driven by people saying, well, no, it's too hard. Our systems won't do this, so we can't do it. That's not what I'm saying at all. But I think sometimes if you're not sufficiently engaged from an industry perspective, you can end up writing policy or writing legislative changes or regulatory changes with the best of intentions, but they have unintended consequences and or they don't have the impact that you're looking for. So I think that collaboration and that shaping it collectively, I think is so important. And I do think in the economic crime world, the years that I've been involved, that has progressed hugely. I think the industry relationships with government, with law enforcement, with supervisors, I think are in a totally different place than they were a few years ago, you know, a decade ago maybe. And that collaborative approach, I think is hopefully driving us more towards greater effectiveness, whether that's you know reducing the number of low-value SARS in the system, for example, that I think everybody wants, no matter what perspective you come from. Yeah, it's those kind of things where we really need to work together to say, well, if we make this change, what does that mean for industry? What does that mean for this subsector, this subsector, this subtext, what does it mean for the sectors outside the regulated sector? What does it mean for law enforcement? So I think bringing those conversations together is crucial because all of us, and that's anybody engaged in this, no matter where you sit, government, law enforcement, private sector, regulator, we're all pushing towards the same outcome, right? We're all in this business because we don't want criminals to profit from their crimes. And we want to reduce the harm from crime to society. So we've all got a shared interest in getting this right. And I think that collaboration has been something that has been so, so vital.

Katarina Pranjic 29:12

I definitely agree with you. That was great. And um, you know, I want to leave something practical for our

Key Dates And Practical Takeaways

Katarina Pranjic 29:18

listeners. Maybe we can finish with the, you know, in terms of the key dates to keep on the radar. Is there something that you want to share with the listeners? Any kind of important dates to look out for?

Kathryn Westmore 29:30

Yeah, I mean, I think July is going to be a big month. Apologies if you've got holidays already planned for July. We don't know the exact timing yet, but we expect the statutory instrument to come into force in probably early July, expecting the anti-money laundering strategy, the illicit finance summit at the end of June, which will contain a number of commitments and positioning. So I think July is quite a big milestone in my mind, which is why I've booked the first two weeks of August for holiday. So those I think are the kind of immediate pieces coming up. But I think certainly over the next few months as well, particularly as the attention really, really focuses to what the FATF assessors need for the UK. I think there's going to be a lot there where there'll be some interesting engagement with the industry around how do we kind of get the story together in a coherent way for the FATF assessors. So I think that's going to be something to look out for as well. I mean, there's so many different changes, you know, there's so many consultations on the horizon, you know, looking forward to regulatory, supervisory reform, et cetera. So I think let's get through to July and we can kind of take stock as to where we are. But uh, you know, I do think, as I kind of said at the beginning, there's so much going on. There's so many great opportunities with the MLR changes, with the MLR strategy, the FATF presidency, there's a real change that, or we have the real opportunity, I think, to really make a step change and make a substantive change in the way that which we do things in the in the UK and really lean into the kind of effectiveness agenda. And I'd encourage firms to take advantage of that. We have a regulator in the UK and the FCA who is really starting to encourage that kind of behaviour. So I think it's a great time to look at what you're doing and thinking, right, in this new world, am I doing the right things?

Katarina Pranjic 31:17

Brilliant. I was asking about the practical advisor in that hope, and it was so good. Such a great deal.

Kathryn Westmore 31:24

I wonder how practical it is.

Katarina Pranjic 31:26

If you're planning for a holiday, if you're working compliance role, this might be a good time for you to go on holiday. Amazing, amazing.

Closing And Where To Learn More

Katarina Pranjic 31:33

Um, Kathryn, this has been genuinely, you know, illuminating conversation. Loved it to bits. Thank you so much for your time and for the clarity you bring to the landscape and the passion that you bring to the industry. It's been amazing. Thank you so much.

Kathryn Westmore 31:48

No, thank you. Thank you, For me I really enjoyed the conversation. I think we could have kept going for a lot longer, and I hope we will have the opportunity to do so again. 100%.

Katarina Pranjic 31:56

Same, same here. And uh to our listeners, if you want to explore the regulatory developments we have discussed today or want to learn more about UK Finance work, we will include links in the show notes if you want to understand how LexisNexis Risk Solutions helps organizations navigate the latest regulatory standards, including horizon scanning, sanctioned screening, and AML compliance, please do visit uh risk.lexisnexis.co.uk. Thanks everyone and stay tuned for the next episode of the RegTech Pulse. Bye.