The FCA gets a date: 2028 for AML supervision of lawyers, accountants and trustees
The Home Office published its anti-money laundering and asset recovery strategy for 2026 to 2029 on 15 September. Buried in 101 pages is a timetable that matters to every private client adviser: supervision moves to the FCA in 2028.
On 15 September 2026 the Home Office published the Anti-money laundering and asset recovery strategy: 2026 to 2029, a 101-page policy paper setting out how the government intends to run the UK’s anti-money laundering system for the next three years. It was laid before Parliament and is backed by at least £550 million of investment to 2029 and more than 500 additional officers.
Most of the coverage went to the enforcement headline. The line that matters to advisers sits further in. Consolidation of AML supervision for lawyers, accountants and trust and company service providers under the Financial Conduct Authority now has a year attached to it: 2028.
What the strategy actually commits to
The paper is organised around asset recovery. It creates a National Crime Agency Asset Recovery Office, launches a public-private asset recovery pilot, and promises legislation giving the UK Financial Intelligence Unit new information-gathering powers alongside more specialists to work suspicious activity reports. In the first year the stated priority is disrupting Russian-speaking professional money laundering networks.
The government sets out its own scorecard. In 2025/26 there were 3,158 system-wide illicit finance disruptions, up 15 per cent on the previous year, and 4,085 money laundering convictions, up 11 per cent. It recovered £345.3 million and denied £1.1 billion to criminals. More than 33,000 entities are now on the Register of Overseas Entities. The strategy is candid that this is not enough: “the threat is evolving rapidly. If we do not keep up, we will fall behind.”
The supervisory reform itself is not new. The government confirmed in October 2025 that the FCA would replace the existing professional body supervisors for the legal and accountancy sectors and for trust and company service providers, and the Treasury published its consultation response in June 2026. The September strategy adds the year.
Why a supervisory change lands harder than an enforcement one
Roughly 60,000 professional services firms currently sit under 23 professional body supervisors. Moving them to the FCA swaps peer supervision for the financial services kind, which is a different activity. Law firms and accountancy practices should expect more demands for data, named accountability at senior level, and supervisors who want evidence that controls work rather than evidence that they exist on paper.
Better registers only answer half the question. Dermot Corrigan, chief executive of the KYC automation firm smartKYC, told WealthBriefing that improved beneficial ownership data is a “partial fix”, because “registers tell you who owns this asset, not how the individual accumulated their wealth”. His second point lands closer to home for this readership: the counterparty is rarely the client alone, but the client together with trusts, special purpose vehicles, foundations, family offices and nominees, and that cluster keeps changing over the life of the relationship.
Not everyone is convinced the plumbing will follow the ambition. Veronica Stratford-Tuke of the Royal United Services Institute welcomed the shift towards joint work on the most harmful laundering rather than box-ticking, but noted that “improvements on paper are not the same as keeping dirty money out of the UK”, and questioned the durability of funding drawn from the Economic Crime Levy on regulated firms.
What it means for family offices
Most of the advisers around a family will answer to one regulator instead of several, and to a regulator that runs banks. Firms that have relied on their professional body understanding how private client work actually gets done will find the FCA less interested in custom. Expect slower onboarding, harder questions about the source of wealth behind older structures, and a few smaller practices concluding the regulated work is no longer worth keeping.
The families most exposed are the ones whose structures predate current standards and whose record of how the original money was made sits in a box somewhere rather than a file. Two years is not long to reconstruct that, and it gets harder each year as the people who remember the transactions retire.
Sources: GOV.UK; WealthBriefing; WealthBriefing; Norton Rose Fulbright.