Finance
Canada to create powerful financial crimes agency as US weakens its approach
Canada is to establish a new and powerful law enforcement agency to investigate financial crime, in stark contrast to the US, where weakened federal investigators have struggled to pursue fraudsters and the White House has pardoned convicted money launderers.
A bill to create the Financial Crimes Agency (FCA) completed its first reading in parliament this week. The legislation was introduced by the governing Liberals and with their parliamentary majority, the party is likely to move it through both levels of government quickly.
The new agency, tasked with investigating and prosecuting financial crimes, is the result of a public inquiry that found Canada lacked a cohesive strategy against money laundering, placing it behind its international peers.
Jessica Davis, a former intelligence analyst with Canada’s spy agency who focuses terrorism and illicit financing, said: “The fact we’re actually seeing the creation [of a] new enforcement agency is a meaningful investment and hopefully signals the understanding of the seriousness of the challenge.”
In addition to a new law enforcement agency, Canada will ban cryptocurrency ATMs, which officials say have been used by scammers to defraud victims and by criminals to launder the proceeds of crime. Canada has nearly 4,000 cryptocurrency ATMs, the most per capita in the world.
For more than a quarter of a century, the financial transactions and reports analysis centre (Fintrac) has functioned as Canada’s financial intelligence unit. Last year, the agency uncovered $45bn in transactions from money laundering, counterterrorist financing, sanctions and evasion disclosures.
“It’s a figure that could be too high or far too low – we just don’t fully know the scope of financial crime in this country,” said Davis, who runs the consulting firm Insight Threat Intelligence.
Fintrac does not track and arrest criminals, instead handing off its investigations to the police and prosecutors. Under the new legislation, the newly formed FCA will investigate and prosecute – a move that lessens the scope and mandate of Fintrac and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the country’s federal law-enforcement authority.
“The challenge for the RCMP is that it has been unable and unwilling to actually investigate and sustain investigations related to financial crimes,” said Davis. “There is a lack of funding, a lack of skills, lack of resources and a lack of political will. But financial crimes investigations are long, complex and require sustained resources, which I’m hopeful we’re now going to see put in place.”
A 2024 report on the scale of financial crimes estimated that more than US$3tn in illicit funds had moved through the global financial system in the previous year. Among the largest culprits were money laundering for human and drug trafficking, as well as terrorist financing. A 2024 report from the US treasury department found those efforts had had “devastating economic and social impact” on citizens.
The Canadian effort marks a stark contrast to the approach taken by the current US administration to the scourge of financial crime. Donald Trump’s government issued a high-profile pardon of Changpeng Zhao after the self-styled “king” of cryptocurrency pleaded guilty to money laundering charges. His company, Binance, had been ordered to pay a record $4.3bn penalty for its role in facilitating terrorist financing.
In a January letter to federal watchdogs, senior Democrats called for an investigation into Trump’s decision to shift more than 25,000 personnel away from investigating fraud, tax evasion and money laundering in favour of immigration enforcement.
“The Trump administration is letting white-collar criminals off the hook for all kinds of wrongdoing,” senator Elizabeth Warren, from Massachusetts, said in a statement. “Instead of protecting American families from fraud and predatory behaviour, the administration is diverting resources to pursue its inhumane immigration agenda. Nobody is above the law, and the Trump administration needs to stop treating white-collar criminals with kid gloves.”
“Canada and the US are diverging,” said Davis, adding that the US was still “far ahead of us in terms of its ability to prosecute and invest, investigate and prosecute” financial crimes. “We’re still playing quite a bit of catchup now. Hopefully Canada will shore up our own abilities to protect Canada. Because the things that happen in the US do tend to happen in Canada. And so this new agency is a bulwark against that.”
The creation of a new law enforcement agency was applauded by anti-corruption groups. Salvator Cusimano, the executive director of Transparency International Canada, said: “The [Canadian] government is proposing an ambitious but realistic mandate for this agency, which bodes well as a much-needed first step in improving our enforcement of financial crimes.
“Once established, the agency must coordinate closely with other enforcement and regulatory agencies across the country, and build on their efforts, if it is to achieve its potential.”
It is unclear how easily the agency will work alongside the RCMP, where it will be based and whether it will draw key resources from other units.
Davis said: “This agency is going to matter to Canadians because when you start to combine things like economic pressures, the cost of living and really difficult sort of existence for everyday people, we start to have less tolerance for people making money off of us.
“This is a massive and necessary investment for Canada. But we’ll also have to keep pressuring the government to continue to fund it, continue to prioritise it, to actually get some of those outcomes that we’re looking for.”
The UK’s financial regulator should consider expanding its oversight to cover advanced artificial intelligence models used in financial services, according to a review commissioned by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), as policymakers assess whether existing rules can keep pace with rapidly evolving AI technology.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), the city state’s central bank and financial regulator, has joined forces with major financial institutions and FinTechs to release a white paper aimed at keeping AI agents in finance operating within safe limits.
The paper, called Safeguards for Agentic Finance at Runtime (SAFR), lays out an industry-built framework designed to let AI agents perform financial tasks in a manner that is safe, secure and dependable. It has been produced under BuildFin.ai, the MAS programme that backs the responsible creation and rollout of AI tools across the financial sector.
The push comes as AI agents take on more autonomous work at a pace that makes hands-on human oversight impractical. In response, firms require real-time controls that keep agent behaviour inside the mandates, policies and risk limits they have defined. SAFR answers this with a series of governance checkpoints that check and log each action an agent proposes before that task is carried out.
The framework extends the AI Risk Management toolkit created through MAS’ Project Mindforge, concentrating on how protections can be put into practice at the moment an agent acts. The white paper maps out how measures such as policy bound execution, real time validation, auditability and interoperability can be woven into system operations, giving institutions the confidence to deploy agents consistently.
Industry participants have already tested SAFR in several settings. These include agent-assisted payments and treasury work, where agents handle routine transactions inside set mandates to cut friction and lift efficiency; wealth management and advisory processes, where agents examine documents and produce structured assessments within tightly defined task limits to speed up compliance reviews; and client engagement, where agents create insights and draft materials within approved content boundaries so staff can serve clients more productively.
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Talking about finances can be stressful, but it’s even more stressful if you’re not sure what advice is good and what advice might put you in a worse position than you started in.
Recently, a Reddit user who goes by market_vision1 asked, “What is the worst financial advice people still repeat?” I took out a little pen and paper while I was reading through these, like, “Lemme write that down. And that. Oh! And that, too!” I’m curious what you think, though. Are all of these things we should avoid financially?
1. “One of the more damaging ideas out there is ‘Oh, you’re young, don’t worry about money, just go have fun and worry about it when you are older.’ Of course, the number one regret I hear from clients nearing retirement is that they wish they had just started saving when they were younger.”
—u/hems86
2. “The ‘tax bracket’ myth should be illegal. My uncle turned down a $10K raise because he thought he’d ‘lose money.’ He literally paid $10,000 to avoid $2,200 in taxes. That’s not a tax strategy. That’s a $7,800 donation to the Dumba— Fund, and he’s the chair.”
—u/Serious_Cress5040
Related: “31 Things Only Super Wealthy People Can Buy That You Probably Don’t Even Know Exist”
3. “People living outside of their means and not realizing it. They say things like, ‘You deserve X, don’t settle for less.’ Most of the people I see who are broke are not 100% victims of the system. The majority of people waste their money on dumb stuff that they can’t afford. They’ll tell me they’ve cut out all unnecessary spending, but when I look at their actual expenses, I see otherwise. Spending $800 a month on DoorDash, financing a new car with a $900 monthly payment, going on international vacations, spending 70% of their income on rent in a fancier apartment when there are options for cheaper living.”
—u/hems86
4. “I’m a financial planner, and some of the worst advice I’ve ever heard is ‘Don’t pay off your credit cards in full. Carrying a balance on your credit card builds your credit; paying it off every month hurts your score.’ People say this to me all the time when I ask why they carry a balance on their card with 25% interest when they have more than enough to pay it off.”
—u/hems86
5. “It’s not so much advice as it is a financial choice. I know people who are taking out 96-month loans on cars they never should’ve considered in the first place, just because they can make the car note when it’s stretched over eight years. They never considered the interest on the loan plus the rate cars depreciate and are befuddled when they can’t afford to trade it in.”
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