Glossary
AML (anti-money laundering)
AML, anti-money laundering, is the body of law and practice that obliges financial businesses to know their customers, monitor transactions, report suspicious activity and keep records, so that criminal money cannot pass through them: in the EU the anti-money-laundering directives and the coming regulation, in the UK the Money Laundering Regulations, with the FATF recommendations behind them worldwide. Payment institutions, e-money institutions and banks are obliged entities; a software vendor that never holds funds is not, but its platform must give the obliged entity what its programme needs.
The programme
A risk assessment of the business, customer due diligence scaled to risk, screening of customers against sanctions and politically exposed persons lists, monitoring of transactions against expected behaviour, investigation and reporting of suspicious transactions to the financial intelligence unit, record keeping for at least five years after the relationship ends, training and an appointed compliance officer.
What monitoring looks at
Volume and ticket size against the merchant’s profile, structuring below thresholds, round amounts, unusual countries, velocity per card or account, refunds to a different instrument, mismatches between the declared activity and the payments, payouts to new accounts. Rules catch the known patterns; the compliance team reviews the rest.
On the platform
Tranzify gives the obliged client limits per merchant and per instrument, velocity rules in routing, reports by merchant, country and method, a journal of every payment kept five years and logs kept ten, and exports for investigations; the risk assessment, the decisions and the reports to the authority are the client’s.
Updated: 2026-11-08