Source of Wealth (SoW)
Source of wealth is the evidenced account of how a customer accumulated their overall assets — the business they built, the inheritance, the years of earnings — as distinct from the origin of the particular money moving through one transaction.
Also called: SOW
Source of wealth is the longer story: how did this person come to have what they have? It is answered with a narrative and with evidence covering years rather than a single transfer — the sale of a business, an inheritance, two decades of professional earnings, a portfolio built out of those earnings, property bought and sold.
Because the question spans a working life rather than a payment, the evidence looks different. Audited accounts and a share purchase agreement for the business sale. A grant of probate and estate accounts for the inheritance. Tax filings, employment contracts, valuation reports. A bank statement shows the last step of the journey and almost never the journey itself.
How far a firm goes is meant to be proportionate to risk. A retail customer sending a modest remittance is not asked to account for a lifetime of accumulation; a private banking client in a high-risk jurisdiction, or a politically exposed person, will be, as part of enhanced due diligence. Nor is the exercise permanent. When the picture changes — an inflow far beyond anything the file explains — the file is expected to be revisited rather than relied on.
In practice
Source of wealth is about how the customer accumulated everything they have, which usually cannot be evidenced from a bank statement. A statement shows the most recent movement; the question asks about years.
Example
A founder deposits a large sum after selling their company. Source of funds is the completion payment from the buyer, and one document settles it. Source of wealth is the eleven years before it: the incorporation, audited accounts showing the business growing, the share purchase agreement, and the tax filing on the gain. The first is a document. The second is a file.
Commonly confused with
| Term | How it differs |
|---|---|
| Source of Funds | Source of funds is the origin of one payment; source of wealth is the origin of the customer’s assets as a whole, and the two answers are often unrelated. |
See also
- Source of FundsSource of funds is the evidenced origin of the specific money in a transaction or account — where this particular payment came from and how it reached the customer. It is a narrower question than source of wealth, which asks how the customer accumulated their assets overall.
- Enhanced Due DiligenceEnhanced due diligence, or EDD, is the additional scrutiny applied where money laundering risk is higher. In the UK and the EU it is mandatory in prescribed cases — politically exposed persons, high-risk countries, correspondent banking — as well as wherever a firm’s own risk assessment says the baseline is not enough.
- Politically Exposed PersonA politically exposed person is someone entrusted with a prominent public function, together with their close family and known associates, who is treated as higher risk because such positions create opportunity for bribery and corruption. The label is a risk classification, not an accusation.
- Customer Due DiligenceCustomer due diligence, or CDD, is the baseline set of checks a regulated firm performs on a customer: who they are, who owns and controls them, and what activity to expect. It is done at onboarding and then kept current for as long as the relationship lasts, with risk rather than a fixed calendar setting when it is revisited.