The Seven-Signal Scorecard: Reading the September Decision
Correspondent banking relationships have declined 30% since 2011 as institutions exited high-risk corridors to reduce financial crime exposure — a strategy that FATF's 2025 updated guidance has called out directly for pushing payment flows into informal channels and making the underlying risk worse. Issue No. 18 examines the compliance economics driving de-risking, why managing risk rather than avoiding it is now the regulatory expectation, and how agent-assisted due diligence changes the cost calculus that made exiting a relationship cheaper than investigating it.