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LexisNexis Risk Solutions has released polling showing that half of Australian compliance teams see disconnected systems and data silos as their biggest gap. That was the highest share among the Asia-Pacific markets covered by the survey.
The poll also found that sanctions evasion is the biggest financial crime challenge for a third of Australian practitioners, while beneficial ownership opacity, mule or scam flows, crypto and trade-based risks are each of concern to one in six respondents.
Across Asia-Pacific, nearly six in 10 financial crime practitioners said crypto- and virtual asset-related activity, and mule or scam flows, were the most difficult compliance typologies to manage. More than a quarter of respondents across the region identified disconnected systems and data silos as their biggest strategy gap.
The findings point to two distinct risk environments in the region. In higher-volume payment markets such as the Philippines and Malaysia, institutions are dealing more with transaction fraud and crypto-related risks. In Singapore and Australia, pressure falls more heavily on beneficial ownership opacity, sanctions exposure, and fragmented internal data.
Hong Kong sits between those patterns. There, 43% of respondents identified crypto as the biggest compliance challenge, while 29% pointed to transparent ownership, reflecting the city's role in cross-border financial flows and changing rules around virtual asset service providers.
Regional split
Singapore recorded some of the strongest concerns about ownership complexity and sanctions evasion. Seven in 10 respondents identified either beneficial ownership or sanctions evasion as the most difficult typologies to manage, compared with 22% in the Philippines and 40% in Malaysia.
Almost half of the Singaporean respondents (46%) identified data silos as their biggest strategic gap. That suggests institutions may struggle to build the connected-ownership view that regulators increasingly expect when examining cross-border clients, counterparties, and control structures.
In Hong Kong, the operational picture was broader. Alongside the 43% who cited crypto as the top challenge, 40% highlighted poor visibility across trade relationships and counterparties, as well as slow or reactive risk detection.
Australia's figures stood out because infrastructure concerns were more pronounced than in other countries surveyed. Half of respondents said disconnected systems and data silos were the main constraint on their work, indicating that compliance teams may find it harder to combine transaction records, trade documents, and counterparty information when reviewing complex cases.
That matters especially in trade-based money laundering, where indicators can be spread across different data sets rather than appearing in a single suspicious transaction. If those sources sit in separate systems, institutions may struggle to spot links between shipments, payment flows, and ownership structures.
Common challenge
The polling was based on responses from 129 practitioners in compliance, risk, and financial crime teams at banks, fintechs, and payment service providers across Singapore, Australia, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Malaysia.
While the mix of threats varied by market, the survey suggested limited visibility remained a common operational weakness. Institutions with a broader view across customers, counterparties, and ownership structures are generally better placed to identify patterns that siloed systems can miss.
Rohit Mittal, Director of Financial Crime Compliance, Asia-Pacific, LexisNexis Risk Solutions, said the nature of financial crime had shifted beyond isolated transactions.
"Financial crime is increasingly network-driven, not transaction-driven," Mittal said.
"Across the region, institutions are dealing with different risk priorities, but the underlying challenge is the same. Risk often sits in the connections between entities, and if your data sources are not providing sufficient visibility, those risks can be difficult to detect," he said.
The survey indicates that firms are trying to respond to a more interconnected risk landscape, where sanctions concerns, crypto activity, scam networks, and hidden ownership can overlap. In that setting, weak links between internal data sets become a practical problem rather than a purely technical one.
LexisNexis said the issue extends beyond the boundaries of a single institution. Cross-border financial crime often leaves partial signals across different organisations, jurisdictions, and record types, making detection more difficult when teams rely solely on their internal information.
"Financial crime does not stop at the boundaries of a single institution," Mittal said.
"Collaborative intelligence gives compliance teams access to patterns and signals that internal data alone will not surface. As financial crime becomes more interconnected and multinational, institutions that fail to connect their data risk missing the signals that matter most," he said.