Alert triage is the first-level review of alerts generated by transaction monitoring, sanctions screening or other detection systems, in which analysts prioritize alerts by risk, gather initial context, and decide whether each alert can be closed as explained or must be escalated for full investigation and a possible suspicious activity report.

A Currency Transaction Report (CTR) is a US Bank Secrecy Act filing that financial institutions submit to FinCEN for each cash deposit, withdrawal, exchange or transfer of more than $10,000 in a single business day. Unlike a SAR, a CTR is threshold-based and does not imply that the activity is suspicious.

Customer Due Diligence (CDD) is the core anti-money laundering obligation to identify and verify customers and their beneficial owners, understand the nature and purpose of each relationship, build a customer risk profile, and conduct ongoing monitoring so that activity stays consistent with what the institution knows about the customer.

Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD) is the set of additional checks a financial institution applies to customers, relationships or transactions that present higher money laundering or terrorist financing risk. It typically includes deeper verification of source of funds and wealth, senior management approval, and more frequent, intensive monitoring than standard customer due diligence.

False positives in AML are alerts from transaction monitoring or screening systems that, after review, turn out not to involve suspicious activity or a true sanctions or PEP match. They consume analyst time and can delay legitimate payments, so reducing them without missing true risk is a central goal of AML tuning.

Know Your Business (KYB) is the due diligence process for onboarding companies and other legal entities: verifying that the business exists, understanding its ownership and control structure, identifying and verifying its beneficial owners, and assessing its money laundering risk based on its activities, geography and transaction profile.

Know Your Customer (KYC) is the process financial institutions use to identify and verify who their customers are, understand the purpose of the relationship, and assess the money laundering and financial crime risk each customer presents. It combines identity verification at onboarding with ongoing checks throughout the customer relationship.

Know Your Transaction (KYT) is an industry term for analyzing individual transactions, especially crypto-asset transfers, in real time or near real time to assess their money laundering and sanctions risk. For crypto, it typically uses blockchain analytics to trace where funds came from and where they are going before or after a transfer settles.

An MLRO (Money Laundering Reporting Officer) is the senior individual in a regulated firm who receives internal suspicious activity reports, decides whether to report them to the national financial intelligence unit, and oversees the firm's anti-money laundering systems and controls. The title is used mainly in the UK; equivalents include the US BSA officer.

A Politically Exposed Person (PEP) is an individual who holds or has held a prominent public function, such as a head of state, senior politician, senior judge or senior official of a state-owned enterprise, along with their family members and close associates. PEPs face heightened due diligence because their position can create bribery and corruption risk.

The risk-based approach is the principle, set by FATF Recommendation 1, that countries and financial institutions should identify and assess their money laundering and terrorist financing risks and apply controls proportionate to those risks, focusing more resources on higher-risk customers, products and geographies and allowing simplified measures where risk is low.

Sanctions screening is the process of checking customers, counterparties, beneficial owners, wallet addresses and transactions against government sanctions lists, such as OFAC's SDN List and the UK and EU consolidated lists, to prevent dealings with designated persons and to freeze and report their assets as the law requires.

A Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) is a confidential filing that a regulated financial institution submits to its national financial intelligence unit when it knows or suspects that a transaction or activity may involve money laundering, terrorist financing or other financial crime. In the EU the equivalent is usually called a suspicious transaction report (STR).

Transaction monitoring is the ongoing review of customer transactions and behavior to detect activity that may indicate money laundering, terrorist financing, fraud or sanctions evasion. It uses rules, scenarios and models to generate alerts, which analysts investigate to decide whether a suspicious activity report is needed.

The Travel Rule is the requirement that financial institutions and virtual asset service providers send identifying information about the originator and beneficiary along with a funds or crypto-asset transfer. Based on FATF Recommendation 16, it applies in the US, EU and UK with different thresholds and rules for self-hosted wallets.