Topic archive
Plain-language learning briefs that route you to the key ideas, operational questions, and practical context for this part of the payment ecosystem.
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Politically exposed persons hold prominent public roles that carry higher corruption risk. Screening flags them so a bank applies enhanced due diligence — a deeper, documented review and senior sign-off — rather than the hard payment stop a sanctions match triggers.
Adverse media screening checks a customer against negative news linking them to crime or misconduct. It surfaces risk that official lists miss and feeds due diligence rather than blocking payments — while generating false positives a programme must control.
Anti-money-laundering transaction monitoring reviews many transactions over time for patterns that suggest financial crime, after they settle rather than in the payment path. Alerts that survive investigation become suspicious activity reports filed with the authorities.
Payment fraud typologies are recognised patterns of attack — authorized push payment fraud, account takeover, and money-mule networks. Knowing each pattern's signals helps a bank detect and prevent it and protect the customer, and stays firmly on the defensive side.
Know your customer (KYC) identity checks and customer due diligence (CDD) establish who a customer is, who owns them, and how much risk they carry, before an account opens and throughout the relationship, with screening as one input.
When staff or systems spot activity that may indicate financial crime, firms escalate it internally and, where suspicion holds, file a suspicious activity report (SAR) or suspicious transaction report (STR) with the authorities, preserving the decision trail throughout.
A customer risk rating scores each relationship from factors such as geography, product, channel, and behaviour, and that score decides whether the customer receives standard or enhanced due diligence (EDD) and how often the file is reviewed.
The travel rule, based on Financial Action Task Force Recommendation 16, requires specified originator and beneficiary information to travel with a transfer through the payment chain, so that every institution can screen it, monitor it, and trace the funds if asked.
Section 314(a) of the USA PATRIOT Act lets authorities ask financial institutions to search their records for named subjects of money-laundering or terrorism investigations. Firms search, report matches confidentially, and — unlike sanctions screening — freeze nothing.
Money laundering moves criminal proceeds through three classic stages so the funds appear lawful. This article explains placement, layering, and integration, and how terrorist financing differs, so controls can detect each stage.
The Financial Action Task Force sets the global standard against money laundering and terrorist financing. This article explains its 40 Recommendations, mutual evaluations, and the grey and black lists and what listing means for a country and its banks.
Transaction monitoring watches for named laundering behaviours such as structuring, pass-through movement, round-tripping, and layering. This defensive article explains each pattern and how scenarios and thresholds surface it for review.
Correspondent banking lets one bank move money through another's accounts to reach places it cannot serve directly. That reliance on a customer's customers raises financial-crime risk, so it is managed through structured due diligence.
Business email compromise and mandate fraud trick a payer into sending money to a criminal's account by impersonating a supplier or executive. Verification, call-backs, and Confirmation of Payee are the controls that catch them.
A beneficial owner is the real person who ultimately owns or controls a company. Identifying the ultimate beneficial owner lets sanctions and money-laundering controls see past the company name to the human behind it.
An end-to-end view of how fraud detection products work — real-time scoring, rules engines combined with machine-learning models, behavioural, device, and consortium signals, case management, and feedback loops that retrain the models.
The Payment Controls Service is an in-network control that screens outgoing payment messages against configurable limits and rules, flagging or holding unusual instructions so fraud and errors can be caught before a message leaves the institution.
The KYC Registry is a shared platform where banks contribute and consume standardised due-diligence data and documents, so correspondent know-your-customer information is collected once and reused instead of exchanged bilaterally many times over.
The anti-money-laundering world runs on a layered set of institutions: a global standard-setter, regional assessment bodies, a network of financial-intelligence units, and an industry group. Knowing who does what makes the rules easier to read.
Trade-based money laundering moves illicit value through the buying and selling of goods rather than obvious cash. Because the value hides in invoices and shipments, controls have to look beyond the payment itself.
Anti-money-laundering reporting runs on two complementary tracks: objective threshold reports for large cash, and judgement-based suspicious-activity reports. Together they give the authorities both a wide net and a sharp filter.
FATCA and the Common Reporting Standard make financial institutions report account information to tax authorities. They share plumbing with anti-money-laundering checks but answer to a separate set of duties.
Anti-money-laundering duties reach well beyond banks, into professions and sectors from law and real estate to casinos and charities. A risk-based approach spreads those duties and asks each firm to assess and document its own exposure.