The FATF has updated its 2022 Methodology for Assessing Technical Compliance and Effectiveness, amended in October 2025, to strengthen how countries’ anti-financial crime systems are evaluated.

The methodology underpins the FATF’s 5th round of mutual evaluations, launched in 2024, and focuses on two key dimensions:

• Effectiveness: Assessments now place greater emphasis on whether countries’ AML/CFT/CPF frameworks work in practice, not just on paper. Evaluators examine 11 immediate outcomes to determine whether laws and policies are being effectively applied, with particular attention to each nation’s highest-risk areas.

  
  

• Technical compliance: Reviews also determine whether countries have the required legal and regulatory instruments in place to meet the technical criteria of the 40 FATF Recommendations, the foundation of a robust system to prevent money laundering, terrorist financing, and proliferation financing.

  
  

The revised methodology ensures a more risk-based and outcomes-driven approach to global compliance. FATF-Style Regional Bodies will progressively adopt the new process as they complete the previous (4th) evaluation cycle.