Daily Compliance Brief — Supervisors Emphasise Data Quality as a Core Financial Crime Control

January 23, 2026

Signal

Supervisory remarks and public regulatory commentary over the last 24 hours reinforced growing concern over data quality weaknesses underpinning AML, sanctions, and fraud control failures. Authorities highlighted that inaccurate, incomplete, or poorlyubatily inconsistent customer and transaction data continues to undermine monitoring, screening, and risk assessment frameworks.

Regulators indicated that data issues are no longer being treated as technical or IT shortcomings, but as governance and control failures. Increased attention is being placed on how firms validate source data, manage data lineage, and ensure consistency across KYC, transaction monitoring, and sanctions systems.

Why it matters

For compliance teams, this elevates expectations around data governance as a first-line financial crime control. Weak data inputs can compromise alerting accuracy, sanctions screening effectiveness, and the reliability of risk scoring, increasing exposure to missed activity and false assurance.

Institutions should reassess data ownership models, quality assurance controls, and escalation processes for material data defects. Persistent data integrity issues may drive supervisory findings, remediation programmes, and heightened scrutiny across multiple financial crime domains.