In July 2026, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) published a report on global public-private partnerships (PPPs), the arrangements through which governments and the private sector share information to fight financial crime.
The report identified at least 84 partnerships in operation across every region of the world, but it also described a spectrum. At one end sit advisory forums that meet occasionally to exchange trends and typologies. At the other sits operational collaboration, where public and private analysts work live cases together against named subjects, and cross-border cooperation that follows criminal networks between jurisdictions.
Most partnerships, the report finds, sit toward the shallower end. The deeper, case-level work is held back by privacy rules, banking secrecy and unclear legal authority to share.
The FATF’s public-private partnership spectrum
The cryptoasset industry remains under-integrated into these PPPs according to the report. Even so, Elliptic is already part of those few live PPPs, with our recent work spanning FATF’s described spectrum, from foundational training to operational deployment.
Partnerships begin with trust and capability
The report is clear that partnerships are built on trust and shared capability, and that cross-border capacity building is foundational yet also among the least developed forms of cooperation.
Elliptic already does this work directly. Earlier this year, we partnered with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) to deliver the first regional training program dedicated to disrupting scam compounds, bringing officers from 11 Asia-Pacific countries together at the Jakarta Centre for Law Enforcement Cooperation (JCLEC) in Semarang, Indonesia.
Our team showed them how Elliptic’s labeled blockchain data exposes the scam ecosystem and, drawing on our own research into a Cambodian scam compound, maps cryptoasset flows down to the individual merchants inside the complex. Building this kind of shared capability across borders is exactly what the report identifies as both essential yet still rare.
The operational end of the spectrum
The operational end is where the report highlights the most value and the least maturity. It is also where Elliptic’s work with UK agencies already sits. The Crypto Cash Fusion Cell (CCFC) is a UK initiative that brings together law enforcement, regulators and private-sector partners to disrupt the criminal use of cryptoassets. Elliptic took part in an operational sprint led by the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI).
The way it worked is what the report considers advanced practice. Elliptic’s investigators and data scientists sat with agency analysts in the room, so questions could be asked and answered the same day. Working with Elliptic Data Fabric, the team cross-referenced OFSI sanctions data against Elliptic’s intelligence on sanctioned entities, traced transactions between those actors and UK-regulated exchanges, and built custom analytical scripts that compressed work which would once have taken days into hours.
The report identifies that such partnerships are, for now, uncommon. The CCFC is a pilot, and the sprint that produced those orders was a time-bound exercise rather than a permanent standing body. The report recognizes both permanent and time-bound partnerships as legitimate, and the direction of travel is toward making this kind of collaboration routine. Elliptic is already equipped for it.
Data protection built in
A central question in FATF’s report was about how partners can share information without weakening the protection of personal data. More than half of the surveyed jurisdictions named data protection rules as their main obstacle to sharing, ahead of banking secrecy and unclear legal gateways.
The partnerships that work do not treat privacy as an obstacle to be overcome. They design for it, and so does Elliptic. In operational partnerships such as with the CCFC, we work within established legal gateways, under need-to-know access and confidentiality undertakings that limit how information is used.
Much of the analytical value comes from arrangements that surface a match between agencies without either side disclosing a full case file. Blockchain intelligence fits this model well, because a great deal can be established from data that is already public before any personal information changes hands. The report’s conclusion is that partnerships should be designed to work with data protection authorities rather than around them.
What the UK Presidency should take from this
The timing is significant. The UK took over the FATF Presidency on July 1, with information sharing PPP among its stated priorities, as well as a sharpened focus on fraud, the threat driving new partnerships fastest around the world. The UK is also where the operational end of the spectrum is already being tested, through the CCFC and the wider crypto work sitting alongside it.
Getting from an advisory forum to a wallet freezing order is the shift FATF is asking its members to make over the next two years. This is not a shift that will be measured by the number of partnerships, but by how deep they go and by whether the cryptoasset industry is appropriately involved.
Public-private partnerships that reach the operational end already exist, with Elliptic part of them. If you are building your agency’s cryptoasset investigation capability, book a demo with one of our experts to see how Elliptic’s blockchain intelligence can be put to work in your own environment.
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