Turning the tide: how the Philippines stepped off the FATF grey list, and what really changes

News that might have slipped past your feed in February 2025: the Philippines is off the FATF grey list. If you work in banking or fintech you already know what that signals, but let’s spell it out. “Grey list” means a country is under increased monitoring for gaps in anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing. It makes investors cautious, it makes cross-border banking harder, and it quietly raises the cost of doing business. Getting removed is not a press-release moment, it’s years of grind showing up at once.

Why does it matter beyond headlines? Because perception moves money. When a jurisdiction comes off the list, fewer counterparties ask for extra documentation, global banks relax some of the friction, and investment committees stop opening every discussion with, “can we even onboard this market?” None of that flips overnight, but the direction changes.

How did the Philippines get here? Not by slogans. Lawmakers tightened the AMLA around obvious pressure points like real estate and casino junkets. The AMLC was given sharper tools to follow suspicious activity and to actually act on it. Regulators pushed for tighter supervision of DNFBPs, money transfer businesses, and remittance operators, and they kept tuning the framework for terrorist and proliferation financing so it matched what partners abroad expect to see. It’s the unglamorous work of aligning rules, enforcement, and data sharing. Taken together, it adds up.

Does this fix everything? No. A label went away; expectations did not. Now comes the harder part: making sure those reforms live in day-to-day operations, not just in policy memos. That means institutions need systems that don’t drown teams in false positives, that keep watchlists current without manual patchwork, and that can explain to an auditor why an alert was closed, in plain language, with evidence.

This is where technology earns its keep. At Azentio we see it up close with AMLOCK: banks want fewer noisy alerts and more signal, screening that reflects local realities, and investigations that join the dots across accounts, entities and time. AI helps, but only when it’s paired with clear governance and good data. The goal isn’t “automate everything,” it’s “surface the right risk quickly and prove your decisioning later.”

What changes on the ground? If you’re a bank in Manila or Cebu, correspondent conversations get easier. If you’re a fintech moving remittances, corridors should feel less sticky as counterparties grow more comfortable. If you’re a compliance lead, the bar hasn’t dropped, it’s shifted: regulators will expect momentum to continue, not drift. That’s fair. Trust is earned in the months after a win like this.

There’s a broader upside too. More predictable compliance lowers the ambient cost of capital. Over time that supports credit growth for SMEs, steadier investment into payments and digital banking, and, yes, a better experience for the millions of overseas Filipinos sending money home. None of that happens by magic; it happens because the plumbing is less leaky.

One last point. It’s tempting to treat “off the grey list” as a finish line. It isn’t. Think of it as the starter’s pistol. Keep policies current. Patch systems before they creak. Measure false positives and fix the root cause, not just the queue. Whether you use AMLOCK or any other platform, the test is simple: are your teams seeing the right cases sooner, and can you show your work?

The Philippines earned this step forward. Now the task is to turn it into a steady stride.