Anti-Money Laundering (AML)
The controls a regulated business must run to detect and prevent money laundering — screening, monitoring, and reporting what they find.
Industry & DomainAML is the obligation; KYC is one part of meeting it. The rest is ongoing: screening customers against sanctions and politically-exposed-person lists, monitoring transactions for suspicious patterns, and filing reports with the regulator. It runs for the life of the relationship, not just at signup.
Two design consequences follow, and both are usually underserved. Customer-side: accounts get frozen, payments get held, and information gets requested — often with legal limits on what you may explain. “Your account is under review” with no timeline is the standard implementation and the reason people call. Saying what will happen next and by when, even without saying why, changes the experience without disclosing anything.
Internal-side: compliance officers work in review queues all day. Those tools are almost always the least designed screens in a fintech product, and they are where a false positive either gets caught or waved through. Better evidence presentation directly improves decision quality — see human in the loop.
In practice
A payments provider's review queue showed alerts as a list of transaction IDs with a risk score. Analysts opened each in three tabs to judge it, handling about 40 a day with a 92% clear rate. Redesigning the queue to show the counterparty history and the triggered rule inline took throughput past 100 a day and dropped the clear rate to 78% — the extra context was catching cases that had previously been waved through.
Where teams get it wrong
- “Under review” with no timeline, which generates the support call it was meant to avoid.
- Treating compliance review tools as internal software that does not need design.
- Alert volumes tuned so high that analysts clear by reflex.
- No distinction between “we need more information” and “your account is restricted”.
- Designing the AML journey without compliance in the room, then rebuilding it after review.
Learn more
You may ask
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between AML and KYC?
AML is the overall obligation to prevent money laundering. KYC — verifying who a customer is — is one control within it, alongside ongoing screening, transaction monitoring and regulatory reporting.
What should a product show when an account is under AML review?
What happens next and by when, even when the reason cannot legally be disclosed. Indefinite silence is what turns a routine hold into a complaint and a support call.
Related terms
All terms- KYC OnboardingThe identity verification a regulated product must complete before a customer can transact — and the step where most fintech signups are lost.
- Transaction MonitoringAutomated screening of payments against rules and models to flag suspicious activity for human review.
- Human in the LoopKeeping a person in the decision path of an automated system — reviewing, approving or correcting before an action takes effect.
- NeobankA digital-only bank with no branches — sometimes holding its own licence, sometimes operating on a partner bank's.
Defined by Mara Last reviewed .
Let's talk about your product.
Happy to look at what you're building and say where design would move the needle.
Contact Us