German draft AML law would remove payment agents from the list of obliged entities and give the FIU new monitoring powers

The German Federal Ministry of Finance has published a ministerial draft of an Act Implementing the Sixth EU Anti-Money Laundering Directive and Strengthening the Prevention of Money Laundering. For PSPs, the useful bit is not the headline Brussels material but the mechanics: the draft would change who is directly in scope, how payment and e-money agents are supervised, and what the Financial Intelligence Unit can order firms to monitor.

1. The draft Anti-Money Laundering Act, or Geldwäschebekämpfungsgesetz (GwBG-E), dated 28 October 2026, is intended to replace the current German Anti-Money Laundering Act, Geldwäschegesetz (GwG), on 10 July 2027. Its main purpose is to implement Directive (EU) 2024/1640 (AMLD6) and introduce national provisions for Regulation (EU) 2024/1624 (AMLR).
2. Under the draft, the scope of obliged entities will primarily be determined by Article 3 AMLR, with Section 3 GwBG-E adding certain national categories. Those include, among others, institutions exclusively engaged in deposit-taking business and institutions providing qualified crypto custody services or maintaining crypto securities registers. Section 3(2) GwBG-E states that AMLR is intended to apply in full to these obliged entities, which are already treated as obliged entities under current law.
3. One concrete change matters for payment businesses: agents within the meaning of Section 1(9) of the German Payment Services Supervision Act (Zahlungsdiensteaufsichtsgesetz, ZAG) and e-money agents within the meaning of Section 1(10) ZAG would no longer be classified as obliged entities in their own right. Today they are in scope under Section 2(1) no. 4 GwG; under the draft, supervision of their AML compliance would generally sit with the supervisory authority responsible for the relevant institution. Under the conditions in Section 79 GwBG-E, supervision by the Member State where the activity is carried out would still be possible.
4. The effect is straightforward: agents would stop being separate obliged entities, but their activity would not fall out of AML supervision. It would move back to the institution level, which is the kind of detail that matters when a PSP is deciding how to structure its agent network and who owns the compliance burden.
5. Section 52 GwBG-E would also give the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) power to instruct obliged entities to monitor transactions or activities involving specified bank, payment or crypto-asset accounts, as well as other business relationships, for a defined period. The draft ties that power to business relationships maintained on behalf of persons who pose a significant risk of money laundering, associated c