Restaurants, kiosks, car washes, salons — any business whose takings are mostly banknotes can absorb illicit cash into declared turnover, which is why cash intensity is scored as a risk factor in its own right, separate from what the business actually does.
The rating above is indicative — it reflects inherent risk as assessed in the published frameworks, not a verdict on any business. Entire industries serve these sectors as business as usual; the rating your firm actually applies comes from its own business-wide risk assessment, where the sector factor combines with your customer base, controls and risk appetite.
Cash remains the placement vehicle of choice: once illicit notes are mingled with genuine takings and banked as revenue, the audit trail starts clean. The EU Supranational Risk Assessment rates cash-based laundering among the most persistent threats, and the new EU AML Regulation answers with a Union-wide EUR 10,000 limit on commercial cash payments, applying from 2027.
Supervisory frameworks — including the risk-factor appendix of the Central Bank of Cyprus AML Directive — treat cash intensity as an elevating factor on its own: a client can be in an otherwise unremarkable line of business and still warrant closer scrutiny purely because of how much of its revenue arrives as cash.
Firms serving cash-intensive clients should reconcile declared takings against the observable scale of the business, monitor deposit patterns, treat unexplained cash growth as a source-of-funds trigger, and report suspicion. Sector risk combines with geography, the customer’s profile and the product to set the overall rating — and every client still needs sanctions, PEP and adverse-media screening on the parties themselves.
