The definitions below are the narrow ones: the meanings that decide whether a payout is released rather than the meanings a word carries in ordinary conversation. Where a term has an everyday sense and a compliance sense, the compliance sense is the one given here.
Voucher terms
- Prepaid voucher — Cash handed over at a till and converted into a code. The code carries the value. There is no card, no account and usually no name attached to it.
- Bearer instrument — Anything whose value belongs to whoever holds it. A voucher code is a bearer instrument: no password protects it, no name is checked when it is spent, and spending cannot be reversed. That single property explains almost every scam pattern involving vouchers, and it is why a code read aloud down the telephone is gone.
- Face value — The amount printed on the ticket. Commission and exchange rates are calculated on face value, not on what the voucher cost to buy.
- Denomination — The fixed amounts a brand is sold in. Vouchers are not sold in arbitrary sums, which is why large amounts arrive as several tickets rather than one. The brands handled here are listed on the supported vouchers page.
- PIN — The secret digits that carry the value. Paysafecard calls its code a 16-digit PIN; other brands use other formats and other names for the same thing.
- Activation — The moment a voucher is armed, at the till, when it is paid for. A ticket that was printed but never paid for exists on paper and is worth nothing.
- Redemption — Spending the value against a merchant or an account.
- Partial redemption — Spending only part of a voucher's value where the brand allows it. What remains is the residual balance. A partly spent code is worth its remainder, not its face value, and this is a common reason a voucher offered for exchange turns out to be worth less than the seller believed.
- Blocked code — A code the issuer has frozen, commonly because it was reported stolen or was bought with a stolen card. It looks perfectly ordinary on the receipt and fails the moment anyone asks the issuer about it.
- Issuer — The company that creates the voucher and holds the money behind it. Distinct from the retailer, the shop that sold you the ticket. The retailer cannot answer questions about a code's balance or status. The issuer can.
- Dormancy fee — A deduction some issuers apply after a period of inactivity, reducing the balance month by month. An old voucher is not always worth what is printed on it.
- Verification — Confirming with the issuer that a code exists, was activated, is unspent, is not blocked, and is worth what is claimed. A person does this, one voucher at a time, which is what how it works describes step by step.
Exchange terms
- Commission — The exchange's charge. Here it is a flat 5% of face value, taken from the amount settled rather than paid separately.
- Settlement — The payment out: the moment value leaves the exchange and reaches the customer.
- Manual settlement — Settlement released by a human being after checks, rather than by software on receipt of a code. It is slower by design and it is the reason a payout is not instant.
- Quote — The rate applied to a transaction. Crypto prices move continuously, so a quote holds for a stated period and then lapses.
- Payout rail — The channel value travels down: a blockchain network, a bank system, a PayPal balance. Each rail has its own costs, minimums, delays and country coverage.
- Hold — A transaction stopped for review rather than refused. Nothing is lost during a hold; it means a person is looking at the file.
Crypto terms
- Blockchain — A shared public ledger of transactions, maintained by many computers rather than one company. Anyone can read it. Nobody can quietly edit it.
- Wallet — Software or hardware that stores the keys controlling coins. The coins live on the ledger; the wallet holds the authority to move them.
- Address — The destination string a payment is sent to. Long, unmemorable, and unforgiving: a payment sent to a mistyped address is not bounced back.
- Network standard — USDT exists on several blockchains. TRC-20 is the version on the Tron network; ERC-20 is the version on Ethereum. They are not interchangeable, and tokens sent on one network to an address that expects the other are commonly lost.
- Confirmation — A transaction's inclusion in a block. More confirmations mean the payment is harder to undo, and most recipients wait for a few before treating funds as final.
- Network fee — What the blockchain charges to process a transfer. It is paid to the network, not to the exchange, and it varies with congestion.
- Stablecoin — A token designed to track the value of a currency. USDT is intended to hold a value of one US dollar and is issued by Tether.
- Irreversibility — The defining property of an on-chain payment. There is no chargeback, no recall, no support desk that can pull it back. This is why an exchange checks before it sends rather than after.
- Custodial wallet — A wallet held on your behalf by a company, such as an exchange account. You hold a claim on the company. In a self-custodial wallet you hold the keys directly.
Compliance terms
- AML — Anti-money laundering. The body of law requiring financial businesses to know who their customers are, watch what they do, and report what looks wrong. CFT, countering the financing of terrorism, is its companion.
- CDD and EDD — Customer due diligence is the standard set of checks. Enhanced due diligence is the heavier set applied to higher-risk cases: more documents, more questions, a slower decision.
- Source of funds — Where this particular money came from. A receipt for the voucher, a bank statement showing the cash withdrawal, an invoice.
- Source of wealth — How the customer's overall wealth was built: salary, a business sale, an inheritance. A different question from source of funds, and asked less often.
- PEP — Politically exposed person. Someone entrusted with a prominent public function — a minister, a senior judge, a central bank official, a senior military officer — together with their close family and known associates. Being a PEP is not an accusation and not a disqualification. It means the position carries a higher bribery and corruption risk, so the file gets more scrutiny and more senior sign-off.
- Sanctions list — A published list of people, companies, vessels and territories that businesses are legally forbidden to deal with. Maintained by governments and by the UN Security Council.
- Screening — Checking a customer's details against those lists, and against adverse media, which is credible public reporting of financial crime.
- False positive — A screening alert on the wrong person. Common, because names transliterate several ways and dates of birth repeat. It is resolved by a human comparing details, which takes time and is not a sign of suspicion.
- Transaction monitoring — Watching patterns rather than single transactions: changes in size, in frequency, in destination.
- Structuring — Splitting one amount into several smaller ones to stay under a threshold. Also called smurfing. In many jurisdictions the splitting is itself an offence, separate from whatever the money was. See how limits work.
- Money mule — Someone who moves another person's money through their own accounts or identity, often recruited through a fake job advertisement and frequently unaware of what they are part of.
- Suspicious activity report — A confidential report filed with a national financial intelligence unit. Tipping off — telling the customer such a report has been made — is a criminal offence in many jurisdictions, which is why refusals are sometimes explained thinly or not at all.
- Risk-based approach — The principle underlying modern AML rules: effort should follow risk rather than being spread evenly. It is why a small routine transaction and a large unusual one are not treated alike.
- VASP — Virtual asset service provider. The regulatory category covering businesses that exchange, transfer or hold crypto for others. A licence application in progress is not a licence, and until one is granted, trading is not enabled. See what a virtual asset licence means.
- FATF — The Financial Action Task Force, the intergovernmental body that writes the global AML standards national laws are built on. It also publishes lists of jurisdictions with strategic deficiencies, which trigger extra checks rather than outright bans.
- Travel Rule — The requirement that identifying information about the sender and the recipient accompanies a transfer above a threshold. Long-standing for bank wires, extended to virtual asset transfers.