Source of Wealth / Source of Funds (SoW / SoF)

These two terms get conflated constantly, and the distinction is the whole point of asking both questions. Source of wealth is the origin of a customer's entire net worth, how they became as wealthy as they are, overall (an inherited family business, decades of salaried income, the sale of a company they built, investment returns compounded over years). Source of funds is narrower: the origin of the specific money involved in a specific transaction or account, where this deposit, this investment, this payment actually came from.

The reason a real Enhanced Due Diligence program asks both, not just one, is that source of funds alone can be trivially satisfied while the underlying picture is still wrong. Someone can produce a clean bank statement showing a $50,000 deposit came from a specific wire transfer, a technically true, fully documented source of funds, while the source of wealth behind that wire transfer (why did that account have $50,000 to send in the first place) is never asked and never explained. A properly run EDD check wants both pieces to make sense together and to be consistent with what's otherwise known about the customer; a source of funds that's perfectly documented but doesn't square with the customer's known source of wealth is itself a red flag, not a clean answer.

Collecting and substantiating this is intrusive, it typically requires supporting documents like payslips, tax filings, business-sale agreements, or inheritance paperwork, which is exactly why it's reserved for Enhanced Due Diligence (see EDD) rather than applied to every customer under standard CDD.

Who actually built this

FATF's interpretive note to Recommendation 10 is the reference text distinguishing source of wealth from source of funds as part of Enhanced Due Diligence. The EU's Anti-Money Laundering Directive and Regulation carry the same EDD requirement forward for member-state implementation. Türkiye's MASAK applies the equivalent obligation for TR-regulated entities. None of it is a Solidus design.

Solidus today

Solidus has not built any source-of-wealth or source-of-funds capability, no document intake for payslips, tax records, or sale contracts, and no workflow to corroborate a claimed source. This gap exists because EDD itself hasn't been built; there's nothing source-of-wealth-specific to add on top of an EDD program that doesn't yet exist.

See also

EDD is the diligence tier this belongs to. PEP is the customer category whose relationships most often require it. UBO and CDD are the adjacent pieces of the same risk picture. AML is the umbrella program this all sits inside.