The UK’s G20 presidency: making the global financial system fairer
Our policy brief for the UK’s 2027 G20 Presidency sets out three reforms to tackle illicit finance and make the global financial system fairer.
Tackling illicit financial flows is part of financing development. It requires stopping wealth from being illicitly generated, hidden and moved across borders, holding those who enable it to account, and returning stolen assets to the people and countries harmed.
Illicit financial flows harm countries at every income level, but the damage can be greatest where public resources are already under pressure. Some banks, companies, financial centres and professional advisers in destination and transit jurisdictions play a central role in hiding, moving and legitimising illicit wealth. A fairer global financial system must therefore address the whole chain: how illicit wealth is concealed and moved, who enables it, and whether stolen assets can ultimately be recovered and returned.
Why the UK G20 Presidency matters
The UK’s 2027 G20 Presidency, alongside its FATF and OGP Presidencies and the announced Illicit Finance Summit, creates a rare opportunity to tackle cross-border weaknesses that individual countries cannot solve alone. The G20 can set political direction, secure commitments from major economies and unlock follow-on work through bodies such as FATF, OECD, the FSB and international financial institutions. We need political leadership that drives concrete international reform. These reforms would also help disrupt the cross-border infrastructure used to perpetrate fraud, conceal its proceeds and provide professional legitimacy to criminal operations.
Three reforms to make the system fairer
1. Make ownership transparency work across borders
Close the anonymity loopholes that let corrupt and criminal actors hide and move illicit wealth across borders, by ensuring authorities and other legitimate users can reliably identify the people who ultimately own and control companies, trusts other legal arrangements, and assets wherever those structures are located. This means moving beyond simply creating registers towards accurate and verified information, effective access and exchange, interoperable systems and data, and the ability to use ownership information in investigations and asset recovery.
2. Hold professional enablers to account
Make it substantially harder and riskier for professional services to facilitate illicit finance, by combining effective risk-based supervision of gatekeepers with credible detection, investigation and civil and criminal enforcement against professionals who deliberately enable corruption, money laundering and other financial crime. Internationally, the ambition should be to establish professional enablement as a systemic cross-border vulnerability and drive stronger standards and enforcement cooperation.
3. Make asset recovery and return work across borders
Make cross-border asset recovery work from end to end: illicit assets should be traceable and recoverable across jurisdictions and, where they represent stolen public resources or corruption proceeds, capable of timely, transparent and accountable return to the countries and people harmed. This means addressing barriers between legal systems, improving the recognition and use of recovery tools, increasing transparency over what is frozen, recovered and returned, and ensuring meaningful participation and accountability around return.
What we want from the UK
Use the G20 Presidency to champion ambitious international action across these three mutually reinforcing reforms; match international leadership with domestic credibility; work with affected countries to shape the agenda; and use G20 political weight to unlock concrete follow-through in the institutions that set global standards and implement domestic policy.
Make ownership transparency work across borders
The problem: creating registers is insufficient if information is inaccurate, inaccessible or unusable across borders. Wealth can also be concealed through trusts and high-value assets beyond company registers.
Make beneficial ownership information usable across borders
G20 members should implement effective access regimes for accurate and up-to-date beneficial ownership information on companies, trusts and other legal arrangements. This should cover domestic and foreign competent authorities and appropriate access for civil society, media and other legitimate users. Building on the G20’s 2014 High Level Principles, members should promote common data standards and interoperability between registers across jurisdictions and with other key datasets, supported by verification, enforcement of disclosure obligations and appropriate data-protection and rule-of-law safeguards.
Extend transparency to high value assets
The G20 should develop commitments to improve transparency over property, crypto-assets, gold and other luxury assets used to store or move illicit wealth. A secure pilot for cross-border exchange of property holdings, transactions and associated ownership data could provide a practical route. For crypto-assets, the G20 should enable relevant information collected and exchanged under the Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework to be used by anti-corruption and anti-money-laundering authorities, through lawful arrangements respecting confidentiality, purpose restrictions and any required authorisation by supplying jurisdictions.
G20 added value: move from the existence of registers to usable cross-border information, and test practical arrangements linked to the Illicit Finance Summit’s property, gold and crypto priorities.
Hold professional enablers to account
The problem: professionals can supply the structures, transactions and legitimacy that conceal illicit wealth. Supervision alone is insufficient where professionals deliberately enable financial crime; fragmented intelligence also makes cross-border networks harder to disrupt.
Raise the international minimum standard for gatekeepers
The G20 should develop high-level principles on effective regulation, risk-based supervision and enforcement of professional gatekeepers, backed by a request to FATF, OECD and other relevant bodies for work on implementation gaps, standards, guidance and enforcement cooperation. The principles should address risky activities regardless of the profession providing them, supervisory powers and resources, dissuasive sanctions and accountability for deliberate enablement.
Strengthen cooperation against enabling networks
G20 members should improve information-sharing between supervisors, financial intelligence units (FIUs), tax authorities, law enforcement and prosecutors, and strengthen cross-border cooperation to identify, investigate and disrupt enabling networks. Sharing must have clear limits on use and onward disclosure, independent oversight, and grounds to refuse or restrict exchanges that could facilitate political persecution or other human-rights abuses.
G20 added value: establish a higher international baseline and secure follow-on technical work and reporting on implementation, rather than principles that end with the communiqué.
Asset recovery and return
The problem: delayed access to intelligence allows assets to move; recovery tools are not consistently recognised across legal systems; and poor data obscures how much is recovered and returned. Countries seeking their assets back can also lack resources or access to assistance.
Improve cross border access to financial intelligence
G20 members should establish practical channels for timely exchange between law enforcement, tax authorities and FIUs, and relevant financial regulators with agreed response timeframes and expedited handling where assets may be moved. Sharing should follow the safeguards set out for cooperation against enabling networks. Exchanges should include relevant suspicious-transaction intelligence and beneficial ownership information already identified, reaching the jurisdictions where owners or assets are located. Joint investigation teams and support for requesting states to trace assets and prepare cooperation requests should help turn information into recovery.
Make non conviction based recovery and return work across borders
The G20 should improve the effective use and cross-border recognition of non-conviction-based confiscation and establish workable routes for returning assets recovered through these mechanisms, including where jurisdictions use different legal bases for recovery and return. Recognition and cooperation must respect due process and protections against politically motivated misuse.
To make results visible, G20 members should collect and publish comparable data with common definitions distinguishing assets frozen, seized, confiscated, recovered and actually returned. They should share this with the Stolen Asset Recovery (StAR) Initiative to support international comparison and public scrutiny.
Affected populations and civil society should participate meaningfully in decisions on the return, use and monitoring of recovered assets, consistent with the Global Forum on Asset Recovery (GFAR) Principles. Sustainable enforcement funding, including appropriate reinvestment of recovered proceeds, should support continuing recovery efforts without undermining obligations to return stolen assets or compensate those harmed.
Turn political commitments into delivery
The UK should seek specific commitments by G20 members, backed where useful by high-level principles and requests for technical work from FATF, OECD and other relevant institutions. Each outcome should identify who will deliver it, by when and how progress will be reported. Where full consensus is unavailable, participating countries can pilot reforms and invite others to join.
The UK should develop these proposals with affected countries and civil society, especially partners in lower-income countries, and demonstrate progress at home.
This brief presents a focused set of priority asks. The wider technical recommendations remain available for detailed engagement. For more detail or to discuss contact Mia Paukovic at the UK Anti-Corruption Coalition mia@ukanticorruptioncoalition.org