Anti-Money Laundering (AML) is the framework of laws, regulations, and operational procedures that financial institutions and payment companies must follow to detect and prevent money laundering. Money laundering is the process by which criminals move illicitly obtained funds through legitimate financial channels to obscure their origin, typically through three stages known as placement (introducing dirty money into the system), layering (moving it through multiple transactions to create confusion), and integration (withdrawing it as apparently clean funds). AML regulations exist to disrupt this process at every stage and are enforced by financial regulators and law enforcement agencies worldwide.
The practical requirements of AML compliance include customer due diligence (KYC), transaction monitoring, suspicious activity reporting, record keeping, and employee training. Transaction monitoring systems analyse payment flows in real time or near-real time, flagging patterns that may indicate laundering, such as rapid movement of funds through multiple accounts, transactions just below reporting thresholds (known as structuring), or payments to and from high-risk jurisdictions. When suspicious activity is identified, the organisation is required to file a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) with the relevant financial intelligence unit, such as FinCEN in the United States or the National Crime Agency in the UK.
For payment companies and the platforms they serve, AML obligations create a layered responsibility structure. The PSP or acquirer is regulated and must have its own AML programme. But platforms that facilitate payments, particularly those that onboard merchants or sub-merchants, also bear responsibility for the transactions flowing through their systems. A marketplace that allows sellers to receive payments is, in regulatory terms, facilitating money transmission, and regulators expect it to have appropriate controls in place. Ignorance of what merchants are doing on the platform is not a defence.
Shuttle Global is a PCI DSS Level 1 certified payment layer connecting platforms to over 40 PSPs. It is not a PSP or an acquirer: each merchant connects its own provider account, and that provider verifies the merchant under its own due diligence process. What Shuttle adds for the platform is transaction and refund data in one format across all its PSP connections, which is easier to review and audit than payment data spread across multiple direct integrations, and the option to connect a third-party fraud screening tool that screens payments before they are taken.