FCA — “Financial crime: protecting the hive” (Steve Smart speech, Sep 2026)

Tag: S-2026-09-18-fca-financial-crime-protecting-hive Type: speech (drafted; “may differ from the delivered version”) Author(s): Steve Smart, executive director of enforcement and market oversight, Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) Date of source: 2026-09-17 (delivered at the Law Society Economic Crime Conference 2026; page first published 17/09/2026) Date ingested: 2026-09-18 Authority weight: high — a speech by an FCA executive director, published on the FCA website (primary UK conduct-regulator source), though a speech states direction rather than binding expectations. Raw file: S-2026-09-18-fca-financial-crime-protecting-hive.md. Source URL: https://www.fca.org.uk/news/speeches/financial-crime-protecting-hive

What it claims

Steve Smart used the speech to set out the FCA’s approach to fighting financial crime and, in particular, its readiness to take on anti-money-laundering (AML) supervision of the legal and accounting sectors [S-2026-09-18-fca-financial-crime-protecting-hive]. He states that “at the backend of 2028, the FCA will begin to take on responsibility for AML supervision of 60,000 entities in the legal and accounting sectors”, and answers the concern that a regulator “built for banks and asset managers” can supervise those sectors by pointing to three existing strengths: the FCA already supervises thousands of firms across sizes and sectors and will not take a one-size-fits-all approach; it is “increasingly focused on finding risk early and disrupting it at pace” (citing sharpened scrutiny of Annex 1 AML-only firms and their over-reliance on parent-company controls and complex lending structures); and it is “using new and emerging technology to sharpen our focus” [S-2026-09-18-fca-financial-crime-protecting-hive].

The technology passage is the governance/AI-relevant core. Smart says “Technology, including AI, helps us to work through large data sets and spot key risks more quickly. Our intelligence systems allow us to process over 56 million records every day and flag high-risk firms earlier than we could before.” He adds that the FCA will “keep exploring what technology can offer, including the potential for agentic supervision – something we’re looking at more broadly across the FCA”, while insisting “AI doesn’t – and won’t – replace human judgment. But it can strengthen it.” [S-2026-09-18-fca-financial-crime-protecting-hive]

The remainder is financial-crime policy framing: fraud accounted for nearly half of all crime in England and Wales last year and an estimated >£100bn is laundered through or within the UK each year; partnership across regulators, firms and law enforcement is essential (the FCA backs the NCA’s data-fusion programme and points to the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act as a safe route for firm-to-firm intelligence sharing); prioritisation matters (nine financial-crime priorities published last year; the Defence Against Money Laundering SAR threshold raised to £3,000 to cut low-value reports); and the FCA’s supervision of the new sectors will be “risk-based, intelligence-led … proportionate, predictable and technology-enabled”, focused on the minority enabling crime rather than compliant firms [S-2026-09-18-fca-financial-crime-protecting-hive].

Notable quotes

“Our intelligence systems allow us to process over 56 million records every day and flag high-risk firms earlier than we could before.” — Steve Smart, 17 September 2026

“Looking ahead, we’ll keep exploring what technology can offer, including the potential for agentic supervision – something we’re looking at more broadly across the FCA.” — Steve Smart, 17 September 2026

“Of course, AI doesn’t – and won’t – replace human judgment. But it can strengthen it.” — Steve Smart, 17 September 2026

“At the backend of 2028, the FCA will begin to take on responsibility for AML supervision of 60,000 entities in the legal and accounting sectors.” — Steve Smart, 17 September 2026

What’s speculative vs. asserted

• Asserted (drafted-speech text, fetched in full): the FCA’s stated plan to take on AML supervision of ~60,000 legal/accounting entities from “the backend of 2028”; the 56-million-records-per-day figure; the intelligence-led / risk-based supervision model; the financial-crime scale figures; the SAR-threshold change to £3,000.
• Signalled / exploratory (⚠️ not a commitment): “the potential for agentic supervision … something we’re looking at more broadly across the FCA” — this is exploration, not a deployed capability or a dated programme. Treat as a direction-of-travel signal.
• Caveat: this is a drafted speech and the FCA notes it “may differ from the delivered version”; it sets direction, not new supervisory expectations on firms.
• Relevance note: the speech’s primary subject is financial-crime / AML supervision (Regulatory Readiness & Evidence). Its AI-governance relevance is the FCA’s own use of AI and its exploration of agentic supervision — reinforcing, with a concrete new figure, the “agentic AI as a supervisory first responder” thread already recorded from the 24 June 2026 Rathi speech [S-2026-06-24-fca-rathi-ai-speech].

Topics this feeds

• FCA — Financial Conduct Authority — new supervisory-scope fact (AML supervision of legal/accounting sectors from late 2028) and a further data point on the FCA’s own AI use.
• FCA approach to AI — the “agentic supervision” exploration and 56m-records/day figure extend the FCA’s supervisory-AI thread (a supervisor deploying agentic AI sharpens the read-across question of what oversight/assurance it will expect of supervised firms).

Open questions raised

• Does the FCA’s own exploration of “agentic supervision” foreshadow more concrete good/poor-practice expectations for firms deploying agentic AI (human oversight, accountability, assurance of agent-generated outputs)?
• What governance and independent-validation controls will the FCA place around its own agentic-supervision tooling, and will it publish any of that as a reference for supervised firms?
• How will the late-2028 AML-supervision handover for 60,000 legal/accounting entities be resourced and phased, and what evidence/readiness expectations will fall on those sectors?