Find your way around the Perimeter

II The terms — A to Z, filterable

Agentic AI AI

AI systems that plan and execute multi-step tasks with limited supervision. In compliance and BD alike, the live question is not capability but accountability: an agent can draft the filing — someone must own it.

AI in monitoring AI

Machine-learning models augmenting or replacing rule-based transaction monitoring — promising fewer false positives and typology discovery, at the price of new model-risk and explainability obligations.

AML / CFT AML / Compliance

Anti-money-laundering and countering the financing of terrorism: the body of law and practice obliging firms to know their customers, monitor activity, and report suspicion.

AMLA EU Rules

The EU Anti-Money-Laundering Authority in Frankfurt: today a coordinator and convergence-driver of national supervisors, from 2028 the direct supervisor of the highest-risk cross-border entities, crypto firms included.

AMLA-CH (GwG) Swiss Rules

The Swiss Anti-Money Laundering Act — Switzerland’s own AML statute, revised on its own calendar. Distinct from the EU’s AMLA authority despite the collision of acronyms.

AMLO-FINMA Swiss Rules

FINMA’s ordinance detailing how the Swiss AML Act applies in supervised practice — including crypto-specific due-diligence rules. A partial revision is in consultation as of mid-2026.

AMLR / AMLD6 EU Rules

The EU AML package’s core: a directly applicable single rulebook (AMLR, applying from 10 July 2027) plus a directive (AMLD6) for what remains national. Together they replace 27 divergent AML interpretations.

BaFin EU Rules

Germany’s Federal Financial Supervisory Authority — the licensing gate for German crypto and fintech, and notably stricter than the EU floor (it ended Germany’s MiCA transition six months early).

Beneficial owner (UBO) AML / Compliance

The natural person who ultimately owns or controls a customer or transaction, behind however many corporate layers. Transparency registers exist to make this answer checkable.

Blockchain analytics Crypto

The discipline (and industry) of clustering addresses, labelling entities and scoring risk from ledger data — increasingly fused with off-chain intelligence. Its outputs are probabilistic evidence, not ground truth.

Capital controls Geopolitics

State restrictions on money crossing borders. Crypto is often marketed as their antidote — which is precisely why states with controls police it hardest.

CASP EU Rules

Crypto-asset service provider — MiCA’s licensed category for firms offering crypto services in the EU. One authorisation, passportable across all member states.

CBDC Money Rails

Central bank digital currency: a direct claim on the central bank in digital form. Politically contested because it hard-codes the question of who may see, and stop, every payment.

CDD / EDD AML / Compliance

Customer due diligence — the standard fact-finding behind KYC — and its enhanced form for higher-risk customers (PEPs, high-risk jurisdictions, complex structures), which demands source-of-funds and source-of-wealth answers.

Chain-hopping Crypto

Rapidly converting funds across multiple blockchains and assets to defeat tracing. The crypto-native descendant of layering.

Chokepoint Geopolitics

A network position everyone must pass through — dollar clearing, SWIFT, a strait, a fab. Control of chokepoints converts economic centrality into coercive power.

Correspondent banking Money Rails

The chain of bank-to-bank relationships that moves money across borders where no direct link exists. Each correspondent is a compliance checkpoint — and a potential de-risking exit.

Cross-chain bridge Crypto

Infrastructure moving value between blockchains. For investigators, a classic layering point: assets change ledger, ticker and analytic tooling in one hop.

De-dollarization Geopolitics

Efforts to reduce dependence on the US dollar and its infrastructure — alternative payment systems, bilateral currency deals, gold reserves. Progress is real but slow: the dollar’s network effects are the product being escaped.

DeFi Crypto

Decentralised finance: lending, trading and derivatives run by smart contracts rather than intermediaries. The compliance question it poses is structural — obligations attach to intermediaries, and DeFi claims to have none.

Designation Sanctions

The formal act of adding a person, entity, vessel or address to a sanctions list. A designation converts yesterday’s lawful counterparty into today’s prohibited one — retroactive exposure included.

DLT Act Swiss Rules

Switzerland’s 2021 distributed-ledger framework, which created ledger-based securities and a DLT trading-facility licence — early evidence of the Swiss preference for adapting existing law over importing EU regimes.

ESMA EU Rules

The European Securities and Markets Authority — the EU-level markets regulator that issues MiCA guidance and coordinates national supervisors like BaFin and Austria’s FMA.

Explainability AI

The requirement that a model’s decision can be articulated to a regulator, a court, or a customer. In compliance, an unexplainable alert is an unusable one — accuracy alone does not survive an audit.

False positive AML / Compliance

An alert that flags legitimate activity as suspicious. At typical rates well above 90%, false positives — not criminals — consume most compliance headcount, which is why reducing them is a business case, not a luxury.

FATF AML / Compliance

The Financial Action Task Force — the intergovernmental standard-setter whose 40 Recommendations define global AML/CFT expectations. Not a regulator, but its mutual evaluations and lists move national law.

Financial statecraft Geopolitics

The use of financial tools — sanctions, market access, reserves, payment infrastructure — to pursue foreign-policy ends. The reason compliance teams end up implementing foreign policy.

FINMA Swiss Rules

The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority — banking, insurance and markets regulator, and the supervisor of Switzerland’s crypto-banks. Swiss firms answer to FINMA practice, not to MiCA.

FIU AML / Compliance

Financial Intelligence Unit — the national agency that receives suspicious-activity reports and turns them into intelligence for investigators (MROS in Switzerland, the FIU-Deutschland in Germany).

Front company Sanctions

A legitimate-looking firm interposed to hide the true, often designated, party in interest. Beneficial-ownership registers exist largely because fronts work.

Grandfathering EU Rules

Transitional permission to keep operating under old rules while a new regime phases in. Every grandfathering window ends with a hard stop — the cliff-edges tracked on the Regulatory Clock.

Grey list AML / Compliance

FATF’s "jurisdictions under increased monitoring" — countries with acknowledged AML/CFT deficiencies and a remediation plan. Listing raises the compliance cost of every transaction touching that jurisdiction.

Hawala AML / Compliance

Informal value-transfer systems settling through trusted broker networks rather than payment rails. Ancient, efficient, largely invisible to monitoring — and a chronic beneficiary of de-risking.

KYC AML / Compliance

Know Your Customer: identifying and verifying who a customer is at onboarding. The front gate of the compliance perimeter.

KYT AML / Compliance

Know Your Transaction: continuous monitoring of transaction patterns rather than identities — in crypto, the screening of counterparty addresses and fund flows against risk indicators.

MiCA EU Rules

The EU Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation: the first comprehensive EU-wide licensing and conduct regime for crypto issuers and service providers. Its transition ended 1 July 2026 — see the Regulatory Clock for the dated timeline.

Mixer / tumbler Crypto

A service that pools and redistributes funds to break the visible link between source and destination addresses. Some mixers have themselves been sanctioned — designating code and contracts, not just people.

MLRO AML / Compliance

Money Laundering Reporting Officer — the named individual personally accountable for a firm’s AML program and its reports. In buying decisions for compliance tooling, usually the economic buyer or veto-holder.

Model risk AI

The risk that a model is wrong, drifts, or is misused — managed through validation, monitoring and governance. AI moves compliance failures from "bad rule" to "bad model", which changes who is accountable.

OFAC Sanctions

The US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control — administrator of US sanctions programs and keeper of the SDN List. Its reach extends far beyond US borders via dollar clearing and secondary sanctions.

On-chain / off-chain Crypto

On-chain: recorded on a public ledger — transfers, balances, contract calls. Off-chain: everything else — identities, intentions, exchange internals, dark-web context. The boundary between them is where most investigative work happens.

Passporting EU Rules

The right to serve the whole EU single market on one member state’s authorisation. The prize that makes an EU licence worth its cost — and unavailable from Switzerland.

Payment rails Money Rails

The infrastructure a payment actually travels on — card networks, bank transfer systems, correspondent chains, or blockchains. Who controls the rail controls who may use it.

PEP AML / Compliance

Politically exposed person: someone entrusted with prominent public functions, plus family and close associates. Automatically higher-risk — not automatically prohibited.

Privacy coin Crypto

A cryptocurrency (e.g. Monero) whose protocol hides amounts and counterparties by design. Widely delisted by regulated exchanges precisely because monitoring cannot see through it.

Sanctions Sanctions

State measures restricting dealings with designated countries, entities, persons or sectors — from full embargoes to targeted asset freezes. In finance they function as a prohibition perimeter drawn around counterparties.

Sanctions evasion Sanctions

The craft of moving value around a designation: front companies, nested accounts, false documentation, third-country transshipment, chain-hopping. Evasion typologies are the empirical core of enforcement work.

SAR / STR AML / Compliance

Suspicious activity / transaction report: the confidential filing a firm must make to its FIU when it suspects illicit funds. Filing is a legal duty; tipping off the customer is an offence.

SDN List Sanctions

OFAC’s Specially Designated Nationals list: persons and entities whose assets are blocked and with whom US persons may not deal. Increasingly includes crypto addresses alongside names and passports.

Secondary sanctions Sanctions

Measures threatening non-US actors with loss of access to the US system if they deal with primary targets. The mechanism that makes one state’s lists effectively global.

Self-hosted wallet Crypto

A wallet controlled directly by its user rather than a regulated intermediary (also "unhosted" or "self-custody"). The regulatory pressure point: rules can bind firms, but keys can be held by anyone.

Settlement Money Rails

The moment a payment becomes final and irrevocable. Settlement finality is the legal point of no return — and the reason "instant" user experiences often sit on slow underlying rails.

SRO Swiss Rules

Self-regulatory organisation: the Swiss model under which many financial intermediaries meet AML supervision through FINMA-recognised private bodies rather than direct state oversight.

Stablecoin Money Rails

A crypto token engineered to hold a fixed value, usually against the US dollar, via reserves or algorithms. Functionally a new dollar rail outside the banking system — which is why regulators treat the large ones as systemic.

Structuring / smurfing AML / Compliance

Splitting sums into many small transactions to stay under reporting thresholds. One of the oldest typologies, and the reason thresholds alone never suffice.

SWIFT Money Rails

The Belgian cooperative whose messaging network coordinates most cross-border interbank payments. It moves instructions, not money — which is exactly why disconnection from it is such an effective sanction.

Terrorist financing AML / Compliance

Funding terrorism — often with small, individually innocuous amounts, which inverts the AML problem: the money is frequently clean until the moment of use.

Trade-based ML AML / Compliance

Laundering value through mispriced, misdescribed or phantom trade flows. Considered one of the largest and least-detected laundering channels because the money moves as commerce.

Transaction monitoring AML / Compliance

The automated surveillance of customer activity against rules and models, generating alerts for human review. Its economics are dominated by the false-positive rate.

Transparency register (TLPA) Swiss Rules

Switzerland’s federal register of beneficial owners under the new Transparency of Legal Persons Act, in force from 1 October 2026 — the Swiss clock’s next hard date.

Travel Rule Crypto

The FATF requirement — in the EU, Regulation 2023/1113 — that originator and beneficiary information accompany crypto transfers between service providers, mirroring wire-transfer rules.

VASP Crypto

Virtual asset service provider — FATF’s umbrella term for exchanges, custodians and transfer services in crypto. The global hook on which national licensing regimes hang.

Wallet Crypto

Software or hardware controlling the cryptographic keys that authorise transactions. The wallet holds keys, not coins; whoever holds the keys holds the money.

Nothing inside the perimeter matches that — try another word or clear the filter.