The European Union’s banking regulator has proposed guidance for financial-sector compliance officers, another step in the bloc’s effort to revamp its anti-money-laundering system.

The proposal from the Paris-based European Banking Authority is the latest move by the EU to harmonize anti-money-laundering rules across member states and shift implementation away from national authorities.

[Continued below...]

In July, the European Commission—the EU’s legislative arm—proposed creating an anti-money-laundering agency with direct supervisory authority over financial companies. The proposal came after twin scandals involving the Latvian bank ABLV and Denmark’s Danske Bank A/S prompted the bloc last year to say it would create a EU-wide anti-money laundering rulebook.

The EBA’s proposal, released this week, kicks off a public consultation period that ends in early November. Afterward, the agency is expected to finalize the new standards.

“This is a step toward paving the way for the new EU-wide authority,” said David Pasewaldt, a Frankfurt-based white-collar defense lawyer at law firm Clifford Chance LLP.

Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler this week declared war on what he called the Wild West of crypto trading, promising a vigorous attack on fraud and misconduct. But progress is likely to be more piecemeal and incremental than wholesale and sudden.

Mr. Gensler’s mission faces several obstacles, including the cryptocurrency industry’s historical resistance to following SEC rules. Because so many crypto developers have bypassed the SEC’s front door, the agency has tried to rein them in through enforcement, a slow process that requires investigating a particular product and either suing the team behind it or convincing them to settle and adopt the SEC’s requirements.

• Read more: Cryptocurrency Compromise Emerges for Infrastructure Bill

• A Russian court found American private-equity investor Michael Calvey guilty of embezzlement more than two years after he was arrested in a case that shook the foreign business community and exacerbated U.S.-Russia tensions.
   
• China’s Huawei Technologies Co. reported a 38% fall in quarterly revenue, as the damage U.S. sanctions have done to its sales of smartphones and telecommunications equipment worsened.

In recent months, China has blown up what would have been the world’s largest initial public offering, launched probes into some of its biggest technology companies, and wiped out more than $1 trillion in market value while investors scramble for cover. 

Antitrust regulators are preparing to impose a roughly $1 billion fine on food-delivery giant Meituan for allegedly abusing its dominant market position to the detriment of merchants and rivals, according to people familiar with the matter.

There are many signs the corporate crackdown is just getting started.

Investors, analysts and company executives believe the government is just getting started in its push to realign the relationship between private business and the state, with a goal of ensuring companies do more to serve the Communist Party’s economic, social and national-security concerns.

For the first time in years, all branches of power in Iran are under the control of hard-liners after a protégé of the supreme leader was sworn in as president, bolstering their power and adding to growing unease that the Islamic Republic’s relations with the West could worsen.

The inauguration of President Ebrahim Raisi on Thursday occurs as Iran and the West are attempting to revive a deal that limits Tehran’s nuclear capabilities in return for lifting debilitating economic sanctions.

The U.S. government is enlisting the help of tech companies, including Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google, to bolster the country’s critical infrastructure defenses against cyber threats after a string of high-profile attacks.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency unveiled the initiative, called the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative, on Thursday. The effort will initially focus on combating ransomware and cyberattacks on cloud-computing providers, said Jen Easterly, director of the agency, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security. Ultimately, she said, it aims to improve defense planning and information sharing between government and the private sector.

“This will uniquely bring people together in peacetime, so that we can plan for how we’re going to respond in wartime,” she said in an interview.

Exxon Mobil Corp. is considering a pledge to reduce its net carbon emissions to zero by 2050, according to people familiar with the matter, in what would amount to a significant strategic shift by the oil company.

In March 2020, Exxon Chief Executive Darren Woods described ambitious carbon reduction targets made by some European rivals as nothing more than a “beauty competition,” saying the pledges lacked tangible plans to achieve them.

Mr. Woods and others on Exxon’s board are now giving the same idea serious debate, the people said. Mr. Woods is facing pressure from investors to demonstrate a bolder path to reducing emissions. Following a bruising proxy fight this year, an activist hedge fund elected three new members to the company’s board.

Moody’s Corp., best known for rating corporate and government debt, is diving into disaster and climate-change risk modeling.

The ratings company on Thursday said it had agreed to acquire RMS, a catastrophe risk-management and modeling firm, from its U.K. parent Daily Mail and General Trust PLC for about $2 billion.

The deal is a sign of the big money to be made from selling data that analyzes changing climate patterns caused by global warming. RMS sells data and analytics to the property and casualty insurance and reinsurance sectors. It has grown rapidly alongside the increased frequency of natural disasters that are changing the way insurers price coverage.

Send comments to the Risk & Compliance editor, Jack Hagel, at jack.hagel@wsj.com

Subscribe to The Morning Risk Report here.

Follow us on Twitter at @WSJRisk, @_MengqiSun, and @dgtokar.