New research from Ripjar, the provider of smarter screening and risk intelligence solutions, has revealed that 84 per cent of senior compliance leaders are concerned about the threat posed by AI-enabled financial crime. With criminals using AI to evade anti-money laundering defences, the entities trying to stop them are struggling to keep up, with only 28 per cent having fully deployed AI in their screening operations.

Published today in Market Analysis: The State of AI in AML Screening 2026, the research surveyed 400 senior compliance, risk and financial crime decision-makers across the UK, US, France and Germany, and found concern in every market. It is highest overall in France, at 91 per cent, and most intense in Germany, where 63 per cent are very concerned. That unease reflects separate figures from The Payments Association’s Financial Crime Pulse, which show 76 per cent of firms believe AI-enabled fraud is already outpacing their ability to respond.

Yet the report also reveals that the response has not kept up with the concern. While 72 per cent of financial institutions have partially deployed AI in their screening operations, only 28 per cent describe it as fully deployed, and those that have tend to spread it thinly across many tasks for small, incremental gains. Broad adoption, the research finds, has not yet turned into measurable impact.

False positives and fragmentation remain a heavy burden in customer screening. More than half (56 per cent) of organisations report high levels of false positives (up to 80 per cent), and fragmented tooling compounds the problem. 90 per cent of firms run more than one screening vendor, rising to 94 per cent in the UK, and fragmented technology was named the single biggest challenge in customer screening.

Matt Mills, CEO of Ripjar, said: “Financial crime has a new set of tools, and they belong to both sides. Criminals are using AI to increase the scale and sophistication of their activities, and the concern this research captures is well founded. Criminals can pick up and deploy a new tool the week it reaches the market, while a regulated financial institution must test, govern and deploy it, and by then the method has moved on. Closing that gap means giving AI a single, resolved view of each customer to work from, not a fragmented one.”