The chief executive of Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said the regulator will no longer be able to defend against every illicit-finance threat equally and must openly prioritize what it focuses on as technology-linked scams continue to rise. 

“We won’t be able to defend everything equally. We have to prioritize,” Nikhil Rathi told attendee’s of the FCA’s financial-crime conference on Thursday, according to a draft speech published on the agency’s website. “We won’t always get it right. But that’s a risk we have to accept to fight financial crime more effectively.”

Artificial intelligence and other tech tools are accelerating criminal schemes and governmental responses to such activity, he said, adding that AI could soon expose cybersecurity vulnerabilities “at a speed and scale the likes of which we’ve never seen.” 

Rathi said the FCA’s own intelligence infrastructure has processed more than 52 million intelligence records and that, at those levels, “it is simply not possible to chase every single lead.” The choices the system now faces, he said, “need the Government to be clear about where financial crime sits in relation to growth, innovation and risk appetite. That’s a policy question. Not a regulatory one.”

The threat landscape has also become more organized, faster-moving, and more technologically enabled, in part because of state actors. 

“Increasingly, there are links with actors connected to some states who are deliberately weakening trust in our institutions and exploiting openness in our systems,” Rathi said, adding that they were “using their ill-gotten gains to fund other illegal and destabilizing activity—whether on the streets of Khartoum or Carlisle—while staying below the radar.” 

The speech also flagged a June milestone for the FCA’s intelligence-sharing with law enforcement, with the regulator planning to begin wider sharing of its data “starting with over 5,000 records via the Police National Database.” Selected banks are piloting action plans under nine joint FCA-National Crime Agency economic-crime priorities and are “already generating law enforcement outcomes,” Rathi said, without naming the firms or the cases.