Instant onboarding, non-face-to-face customers and cross-border reach make new payment products fast — for everyone: the FATF has issued dedicated guidance on prepaid cards, mobile and internet payments, and a 2023 report on crowdfunding's abuse for terrorist financing.
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.
The FATF's risk-based-approach guidance for prepaid cards, mobile payments and internet-based payment services (2013) maps the core vulnerabilities: anonymity below identification thresholds, loading with cash or other anonymous instruments, and rapid cross-border movement. In the EU, e-money and payment institutions are licensed obliged entities precisely because the rails carry these risks.
Crowdfunding adds a terrorist-financing dimension: the FATF's 2023 report documents campaigns for apparently legitimate causes diverted to terrorist activity, anonymising techniques, and an industry with limited expertise in spotting it. EU platforms are regulated under the Crowdfunding Regulation, but many small contributions plus opaque end-use remains a structurally hard pattern to police.
Payment and e-money firms must tune due diligence to product risk — thresholds, loading limits, transaction monitoring — and watch for mule typologies; crowdfunding platforms should verify campaign beneficiaries and end-use; all of them 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.
