Glossary
Every term highlighted in an article, in plain words, with at least one source and the article where it comes up.
4% rule
The 4% rule comes from US research in the 1990s (William Bengen, then the “Trinity study”) which found that a retiree withdrawing 4% of a stock-and-bond portfolio in the first year, and the same inflation-adjusted amount thereafter, would historically not have run out of money over 30 years. It assumes US historical returns, a 30-year horizon and no flexibility, all of which may not apply to a given person. The MIT/Stanford study cited in the article found that 98% of the withdrawal advice given by AI models simply restated this rule, an example of models leaning on heuristics rather than on the individual's situation.
Account aggregation
Account aggregation is the automatic collection of balances, positions and transactions from several financial institutions into a single view. In Europe it relies on licensed intermediaries (in Finary's case Powens, Plaid and Flanks) which connect to banks either through the official open-banking interfaces created by the PSD2 directive or, when no interface exists, by logging in and reading the website as a user would. Access is read-only: the aggregator can see your money but cannot move it.
Accumulating fund
An accumulating (or capitalising) fund keeps the dividends and interest it receives and reinvests them, so its share price rises instead of paying cash. A distributing fund pays them out. In many countries the difference matters for tax: payouts are taxed each year, while reinvested income is usually taxed only when you sell. That is why accumulating funds suit accounts such as Spain's Financia Europa, which does not shelter dividends paid out.
AMF blacklist
The Autorité des marchés financiers and the ACPR publish blacklists of unauthorised forex, crypto, savings and “diversified” investment offers, with about 5,000 entries added since 2022. Since May 2025 the I-SCAN portal aggregates the blacklists of more than 150 regulators worldwide. Because scammers rename platforms faster than lists update, the positive check matters more: an intermediary must appear on the ORIAS register, an investment firm on the REGAFI register, and a crypto provider must hold MiCA authorisation. The AMF’s August 2026 alert on fake press articles promoting “BitKelTrade” shows the pattern: cloned Le Monde and TF1 pages, deepfaked celebrities, and a platform with no authorisation anywhere.
Annual percentage rate (APR)
EU consumer credit law requires lenders to show the APR in advertising and pre-contract information. It captures fees that a headline rate hides: a 'free' instalment plan with a small service fee can carry a high APR because the loan is short. Scalapay's Italian information sheet, for example, shows APRs of up to about 14% to 15% on pay in 3 and pay in 4 because of its service fee.
Assurance-vie
Assurance-vie is a life-insurance contract used in France primarily as a savings and investment vehicle rather than as death cover. Money is invested in a capital-guaranteed euro fund, in unit-linked funds (ETFs, equity or bond funds, real-estate funds), or both. Withdrawals after eight years benefit from an annual tax allowance, and the contract passes to named beneficiaries outside the normal estate rules. Fees vary widely between contracts, which is why comparison tools such as Finary's fee scanner exist, and why Finary launched its own contract, Finary Life, in 2025.
Automated decision
Article 22 of the GDPR restricts decisions based solely on automated processing that produce legal or similarly significant effects, such as refusing credit. In case C-634/21 (7 December 2023), the Court of Justice of the EU held that a Schufa score is itself such a decision when lenders rely on it heavily. The consumer credit directive applicable from 20 November 2026 adds an explicit right to human intervention, an explanation and a review when creditworthiness is assessed automatically.
Bank spoofing (“faux conseiller bancaire”)
Number spoofing is trivial with internet telephony, which is why the displayed number proves nothing. The fraud is the fastest-growing category in France: the Banque de France counts €516 million lost to “fraud by manipulation” in 2025, up 34% and now 41.6% of all payment fraud, and Cybermalveillance.gouv.fr recorded a 159% rise in fake-adviser cases. Since October 2025 French banks must check that a transfer’s beneficiary name matches the account, and a national file of accounts flagged for fraud risk started in May 2026. Whether the bank must refund depends on whether the client was “grossly negligent”, a question the Cour de cassation has ruled on repeatedly since 2024.
Benchmark
A benchmark is a standardised test used to measure and compare AI systems: a collection of questions, documents or tasks with reference answers and a scoring rule. Finance benchmarks range from multiple-choice exams (CFA questions, financial-literacy quizzes) to execution tasks with exact outputs (TaxCalcBench's tax returns, Vals AI's analyst tasks, SpreadsheetBench's spreadsheets). Scores are only comparable within one benchmark, and a high score on an exam does not predict a high score on a task, which is the central point of the article.
Bond ladder
A bond ladder spreads a bond allocation across several maturities. Each rung is held to maturity, so its price swings along the way do not matter, and the money it returns is reinvested at the long end of the ladder at whatever rate then prevails. If rates rise, reinvestments earn more; if they fall, the remaining rungs keep the old higher coupons. The result is a predictable income and an average duration that stays roughly constant without forecasting. Individual government bonds, term deposits and the target-maturity bond ETFs launched in recent years can all serve as rungs; a conventional bond fund cannot, because it never matures.
Bond yield
A bond pays fixed coupons and repays its face value at maturity. Its yield is the interest rate that makes those future payments worth exactly today’s market price. Because the payments are fixed, the price and the yield move in opposite directions: if investors demand a higher return, the price must fall. The 10-year government bond yield is the benchmark from which mortgage rates, corporate borrowing costs and the discount rate applied to company profits are all derived, which is why a move in the US 10-year Treasury ripples into household finances everywhere.
Buy now, pay later (BNPL)
Buy now, pay later covers 'pay in 3 or 4' instalment plans, 'pay in 30 days' invoices and longer financing offered at the checkout. Because the short, interest-free versions fell outside the 2008 EU consumer credit rules (credit under €200, without charges, or repaid within three months), providers did not have to run full credit checks. From 20 November 2026 the revised Consumer Credit Directive brings most third-party BNPL into consumer credit law. The UK regulates it since 15 July 2026.
Central bank money
Today, the only central bank money individuals can hold is cash. The balance in a bank account is commercial bank money: a promise by the bank, protected up to €100,000 per depositor and per bank by deposit guarantee schemes in the EU. A digital euro would give individuals a digital form of central bank money, which carries no credit risk on a commercial bank.
CFA
The Chartered Financial Analyst designation is awarded by the CFA Institute to candidates who pass three sequential exams covering ethics, economics, accounting, valuation, portfolio management and wealth planning, and who have several years of relevant work experience. It is the standard credential for investment analysts and fund managers worldwide, and each level takes candidates hundreds of hours of study. Human pass rates hover between 40% and 50%; in 2025 several AI reasoning models passed all three levels, which is why it appears in the article as a benchmark of financial knowledge.
CFP
A Certified Financial Planner is a personal-finance adviser who has passed the CFP Board's exam on retirement, tax, insurance, investment and estate planning, meets education and experience requirements, and commits to act as a fiduciary when giving advice. The CFP Board, the US non-profit that awards the mark, is cited in the article both for its exam (used as an AI benchmark by the planning startup Origin) and for its consumer surveys on AI-generated advice.
Civil forfeiture
In a civil forfeiture case the defendant is the property, which is why the Prince Group filing is titled United States v. approximately 127,271 bitcoin. The standard of proof is lower than in a criminal trial and the case can proceed even if the owner is abroad. Claimants, including victims, can file to recover a share; in this case the Department of Justice had rejected most victim claims by March 2026 and no compensation framework had been announced by September. The forfeiture, about $15 billion at the time, is the largest in the department’s history.
Code execution
Code execution (called the analysis tool in Claude, advanced data analysis in ChatGPT, and code execution in the Gemini API) lets the model write a script, typically in Python or JavaScript, run it in a sandbox and use the result. Because language models predict text rather than compute, they are unreliable at arithmetic: a 2023 study found GPT-4 got three-by-three-digit multiplication right 59% of the time. With code execution the arithmetic is done by a real interpreter, so a compound-interest or amortisation calculation becomes exact and reproducible. Every major vendor's documentation now recommends it for any numerical task.
Consumer Credit Directive (CCD2)
Directive (EU) 2023/2225 replaces the 2008 consumer credit directive. Lenders must assess the probability that the borrower meets all obligations, may not use special categories of personal data or social networks for that assessment, must tell applicants when credit is refused, and must offer human intervention and an explanation when the assessment is automated. Most buy-now-pay-later offers fall within its scope. France transposed it by ordinance on 3 September 2025, with decrees in February and August 2026.
Credit score
A credit score condenses a credit file (loans, repayment history, balances, recent applications) into a single number. In the United States, FICO scores run from 300 to 850 and are computed from files held by Equifax, Experian and TransUnion; VantageScore, owned by those three bureaus, is the main rival. Scores decide approval and price for mortgages, cards and car loans. Europe varies: Germany has the private Schufa score, the UK has three credit agencies, and France has no national score, only the Banque de France’s negative register (FICP) and each bank’s internal scoring.
Creditworthiness assessment
Under the revised EU Consumer Credit Directive, lenders must carry out a thorough assessment in the consumer's interest, based on relevant and accurate information about income, expenses and other financial circumstances, and grant credit only if the obligations are likely to be met. Social media data and special categories such as health data may not be used, and the assessment may not rest exclusively on credit history. When it is automated, the consumer can ask for human intervention, an explanation and a review. From 20 November 2026 this applies to most buy now, pay later purchases.
Crowd-out
Economists measure the success of a savings incentive by how much it raises total saving, not by how much flows into the account. If savers simply move money from a taxable account into the new one, the subsidy is crowded out: it costs the state without creating saving. A large Danish study (Chetty and co-authors, 2014) found that each dollar of tax subsidy raised total saving by about one cent, while automatic contributions had a much larger effect.
Currency markup
When you pay in dollars with a euro card, your bank converts the amount at an exchange rate and often adds a markup, typically 1% to 3% at traditional French banks. Neobanks and some online banks charge no markup on card payments, or only above a monthly allowance. Revolut’s free plan converts without markup up to €1,000 a month on weekdays, then charges 1%, and adds 1% at weekends when currency markets are closed.
Deemed disposal
In Ireland, investors in many funds and ETFs pay exit tax on the gain every eight years as though they had sold and bought back their holding. It forces tax payments before any money is taken out and complicates record-keeping. Budget 2027 announced a Personal Investment Account, opening in July 2027, inside which deemed disposal will not apply; the rule remains for ordinary accounts.
Deposit guarantee
If a bank in the EU fails, a deposit guarantee scheme repays each customer up to €100,000 across all their accounts at that bank, normally within seven working days. The scheme is the one of the country that licensed the bank, not the country where you live: customers of a foreign bank’s French branch are covered by the home country’s scheme, with the French FGDR acting only as a relay. Revolut’s French customers are covered by the Lithuanian scheme until they are migrated to its French bank.
Digital euro
The digital euro would be central bank money held in an app or on a card and distributed by banks and payment providers. Under the ECB's design it would be free for basic use by individuals, pay no interest, be subject to a holding limit, work offline with cash-like privacy, and never be programmable. The Commission proposed the legal framework in June 2023; Council and Parliament have been negotiating since July 2026, and the ECB says a first issue could come in 2029 if the law is adopted in 2026.
Dunning fee
Dunning, or reminder, fees are charged per late payment or per reminder letter. In buy now, pay later they vary widely: some providers charge nothing, others a few euros per missed instalment, and if the debt goes to a collection agency, collection costs can add much more. In the Netherlands, the AFM found that collection costs of up to €40 nearly doubled the original debt in one case in three in 2024.
Duration
Duration measures the sensitivity of a bond’s price to interest rates. It is expressed in years and is close to the weighted average time until the bond’s cash flows are received, so a 30-year bond has a much higher duration than a 2-year bond. The practical rule is that a one-percentage-point rise in yields cuts the price by roughly the duration in per cent: a fund with a duration of 16 loses about 16%, one with a duration of 2 loses about 2%. This is why long-dated government bond funds lost money in 2022 and again in 2026 even though the bonds themselves never defaulted. Every bond fund publishes its duration on its factsheet.
ECB deposit rate
The ECB sets three rates, of which the deposit facility rate has been the effective policy rate since 2022 because banks hold abundant reserves. It determines the overnight rate €STR, which in turn feeds the Livret A formula, money-market fund yields, and the reference rates of variable-rate mortgages across the euro area. The ECB cut the rate from 4.00% in 2024 to 2.00% by June 2025, then raised it to 2.25% on 11 June 2026 in response to the oil-driven inflation rebound, the first increase since 2023.
Euro fund (fonds en euros)
In a French life-insurance contract, the euro fund is the part where the insurer guarantees the capital and credits a return once a year, typically in January for the previous year. The insurer invests the money mainly in bonds bought over many years, so the return is an average of old and new yields: when rates rise, the fund’s return lags for several years, and when rates fall it stays high for a while. Insurers also smooth returns with reserves. The average return was 2.63% for 2025, unchanged from 2024, and industry analysts expect around 2.9% to 3% for 2026 as bonds bought at today’s higher yields feed through.
Federal funds rate
The federal funds rate is the interest rate at which US banks lend reserves to each other overnight. The Federal Reserve steers it within a target range decided at the Federal Open Market Committee’s eight scheduled meetings a year, and publishes each decision with the vote count and any dissents. Raising the range makes credit dearer to slow inflation; cutting it does the opposite. The Fed cut three times in late 2025 to a range of 3.50% to 3.75%, held through the first half of 2026, and its new chair signalled in late August that increases were on the table.
FICP
Created in 1989, the FICP records characterised repayment incidents (for example two missed monthly instalments) for up to five years, and over-indebtedness plans for up to seven. Lenders must consult it before granting consumer credit, and from 20 November 2026 they may not base a decision on it alone. More than 2.27 million people were listed at the end of 2025. Anyone can check their own entry free of charge online, at a Banque de France branch or by post.
Fiduciary duty
A fiduciary duty is the highest standard of care in law: the person owing it must put the other party's interests ahead of their own, avoid conflicts of interest and disclose material facts. Registered investment advisers in the US owe it under the Investment Advisers Act; EU investment firms owe a comparable “best interest” duty under MiFID II, and French CIF advisers under the monetary code. The duty attaches to a licensed person or firm, which is why the output of a consumer AI assistant, however good, is legally information rather than advice, and why the model vendors' own terms require a licensed professional in the loop.
Flat tax (PFU)
The prélèvement forfaitaire unique (PFU), usually called the flat tax, applies by default to interest, dividends and capital gains in France. It combines 12.8% income tax and social contributions, which rose from 17.2% to 18.6% on 1 January 2026, for a total of 31.4%. Taxpayers can instead opt for the progressive income tax scale for all their investment income. Regulated accounts such as the Livret A are exempt.
Forbearance
The revised EU Consumer Credit Directive requires creditors to exercise reasonable forbearance, where appropriate, before starting enforcement proceedings. Examples include extending the term, deferring payments, lowering the rate, partially writing off the debt or consolidating it. Member states may also require default charges to be no higher than needed to cover the creditor's costs, and creditors must point consumers in difficulty to independent debt advice.
Form 2086
French residents who sell crypto-assets for euros (or use them to buy goods) must declare each taxable disposal on form 2086, attached to the annual income-tax return, showing the sale price, the total acquisition cost of the portfolio and the resulting gain or loss for that transaction. The net gain is taxed at the 30% flat rate by default. Because the calculation depends on the whole portfolio's value at each sale, people with dozens of transactions rely on specialised software; Finary provides a CSV export but does not generate the form.
Form 3916
French tax residents must list every account opened, held, used or closed abroad during the year on form 3916 (3916-bis for digital-asset accounts), filed with the income tax return. It applies even when the account earns nothing. A brokerage run from Lithuania, such as Revolut Securities Europe, or a crypto account held by a Cypriot entity counts as foreign; a current account with a French IBAN at a French branch does not. The fine for an undeclared account is €1,500 per account, more for accounts in non-cooperative countries.
Gross negligence (“négligence grave”)
Under the EU payment-services rules written into the French monetary code (articles L133-18 to L133-24), a payment the customer did not authorise must be refunded unless the bank proves fraud or gross negligence by the customer, who has 13 months to report it. The Cour de cassation held in October 2024 and again in June 2025 that a customer who validated transfers during a spoofed call was not grossly negligent, and in July 2026 that strong authentication does not by itself prove consent. It tightened the line in March 2026 for a customer who confirmed operations in the app after an explicit warning. The regime only covers unauthorised payments: a transfer the victim knowingly made to a fake platform is authorised, so refunds there depend on criminal seizures, not on the bank.
Hallucination
In AI, a hallucination is an output that is fluent and plausible but not grounded in the model's inputs or in reality. Language models hallucinate because they generate the most likely-sounding continuation rather than retrieving verified facts. Measured rates depend heavily on the task: on grounded summarisation the best models fabricate in a few per cent of cases, while on open questions about tax rules or financial products the consumer tests cited in the article found errors in a third to half of answers. Hallucinations are most dangerous in finance when they concern a threshold, a date or a product name, because they look exactly like correct answers.
Holding limit
Both the Council and the Parliament accept a cap on individual digital euro holdings, but disagree on who sets it: the Parliament wants the Commission to fix it by delegated act on ECB advice, the Council wants member states to set a ceiling within which the ECB decides. The ECB tested limits from €500 to €3,000 at the co-legislators' request; €3,000 is a test value, not an agreed figure. Payments received above the limit would be swept to a linked bank account.
Home bias
Investors everywhere tend to overweight domestic shares compared with their weight in world markets, out of familiarity or because of rules and taxes. It concentrates risk: a recession or a sector crisis at home hits both your job and your savings. Some tax-advantaged accounts build home bias into their rules, such as Spain's Financia Europa account (70% in the European Economic Area for funds) or Italy's PIR (70% in Italian companies).
IFU
The IFU (imprimé fiscal unique) summarises the investment income of the past year: dividends, interest, capital gains and the tax already withheld. French banks and brokers send it to the tax authority, which pre-fills the return. Foreign brokers are not obliged to produce one, so their clients must calculate gains and fill in forms 2074 and 2042 themselves from the broker’s own tax report.
Interchange fee
In the EU, interchange fees on consumer card payments are capped at 0.2% for debit and 0.3% for credit cards by the 2015 Interchange Fee Regulation, but merchants also pay scheme and acquiring fees on top. For the digital euro, Council and Parliament both want merchant fees and inter-bank compensation capped; how, and for how long, is one of the open points in the negotiations.
Investment-firm licence (PSI)
In France a prestataire de services d’investissement (PSI) is a bank or investment firm authorised by the ACPR, the banking supervisor, with the AMF's approval of its programme of activity, to provide regulated investment services: receiving and transmitting orders, executing them, holding client assets, managing portfolios and giving personalised advice. The licence requires minimum capital and ongoing supervision. Finary obtained it on 31 March 2026, which is what allows it to launch a PEA and a brokerage account rather than only tracking accounts held elsewhere.
Investor compensation scheme
EU rules require every investment firm to belong to an investor compensation scheme. It pays out only if the firm fails and cannot return clients’ securities or cash, for example because of fraud or error; in normal failures, segregated client assets are simply transferred. The cover depends on where the firm is licensed: up to €70,000 per investor through the FGDR for French firms, and up to €22,000 through the Lithuanian scheme for brokers licensed in Lithuania, such as Revolut Securities Europe. Losses from falling markets are never covered.
ISK (investeringssparkonto)
The investeringssparkonto, introduced in Sweden in 2012, replaces taxes on gains and dividends with a standard yield. Each year the capital base (the average of the quarterly values plus deposits) is multiplied by the government borrowing rate plus one point, with a floor of 1.25%, and taxed at 30%. In 2026 that gives an effective charge of about 1.07% of the capital base. From 2026 the first SEK 300,000 held in ISK and similar accounts is tax-free. The provider calculates the tax and it is pre-filled on the tax return. The tax is due even in years when the account loses money.
Large language model (LLM)
A large language model is a neural network trained on a very large corpus of text to predict the most likely continuation of a sequence of words. Products such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini add instruction-following, tool use and safety training on top. Because the underlying skill is fluent prediction rather than lookup or calculation, an LLM can produce confident, well-written text that is wrong, and it performs arithmetic poorly unless it is allowed to write and run code.
Legal tender
Euro banknotes and coins are legal tender. The 2023 single currency package includes a regulation that defines this status for cash and would give the digital euro legal tender status too, with exceptions, for example for small businesses that do not accept digital payments. The Parliament's position adds obligations for member states to monitor access to cash and its acceptance.
Livret A
The Livret A is held by most French households. Deposits up to €22,950 earn interest free of income tax and social contributions, and the money is available at any time. Since 2020 the rate is, in principle, the average of six-month inflation and the six-month average of the €STR overnight rate, rounded to the nearest tenth, with a floor of 0.5%; the government can depart from the formula on the Banque de France’s advice, as it did in 2023. The rate fell from 3.00% to 1.50% between February 2025 and February 2026 as inflation and ECB rates dropped, then rose to 1.70% on 1 August 2026. The LDDS follows the same rate; the LEP, for lower-income savers, is set at least half a point higher.
Loan stacking
Stacking is a particular risk with buy now, pay later, where each purchase is a separate small loan that other lenders may not see. The US consumer bureau found that 63% of BNPL borrowers held several loans at once during a year and a third used several providers. In the Netherlands, 65% of frequent young users paid more than one provider in the same month.
Loan-level price adjustment (LLPA)
LLPAs are percentages of the loan amount, published in a grid that crosses credit score buckets with loan-to-value ratios. They are usually passed on to the borrower through the interest rate or closing costs. Until September 2026 there were separate grids for FICO and VantageScore, with VantageScore needing about 20 more points for the same bucket; the regulator announced a single grid on 28 September 2026.
MiCA
MiCA (Regulation (EU) 2023/1114) is the European Union's framework for crypto-assets. It replaced national registration regimes such as France's PSAN with a single authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider (CASP), valid in all member states, with rules on custody, capital, conflicts of interest and marketing. Existing national registrations had a transition period ending in 2026. Finary obtained its CASP authorisation from the AMF in July 2026.
MiFID II
The second Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (2014/65/EU), applied since January 2018, is the core rulebook for investment firms in the European Union. It requires firms to assess whether a product is suitable for a client before advising on it, to disclose all costs, to record communications and to act honestly, fairly and professionally in the client's best interest. In May 2024 ESMA stated that these obligations apply “irrespective of the tools” a firm uses, including generative AI, and that hallucinated information can amount to misleading advice.
Money market fund
Money market funds hold treasury bills, short-term bank deposits and commercial paper maturing within months. Their yield tracks the central bank rate minus fees, and their value rarely moves, but they are investments regulated under EU money market fund rules rather than bank deposits. Neobanks such as Revolut, Wise and N26 offer them as cash alternatives; the fee charged, which varies from under 0.1% to almost 1% a year, makes most of the difference in what you earn.
Money mule
Most pig-butchering victims never buy crypto themselves. They wire money to ordinary bank accounts, rented from or opened by mules, sometimes in the name of a real business that knows nothing about it; the mules convert the funds into stablecoins within hours. Reporting in 2025 documented accounts at major US banks being advertised on Chinese-language Telegram channels. Acting as a mule, even unknowingly, can be a criminal offence, and a frozen mule account is often the only point at which a victim’s money can still be recovered.
OAT-Bund spread
OAT (obligation assimilable du Trésor) is the French government bond; the Bund is its German equivalent, treated as the risk-free benchmark of the euro area. Their yield difference, the spread, measures how much extra investors charge France. It was around 50 basis points for most of the 2010s, jumped above 80 during the 2024 dissolution crisis, and widened again in 2026 as rating agencies downgraded France, the budget passed without a vote and interest costs rose. A wider spread raises the cost of every new French bond issue and, with a lag, French mortgage and corporate rates.
OFAC sanctions
OFAC maintains the Specially Designated Nationals list. Because most dollar transactions pass through US banks, a designation cuts a target off from the dollar system worldwide, and foreign banks usually comply to protect their own access. Sanctions on the Prince Group network came in waves: 146 targets on 14 October 2025, nine people and 26 entities in June 2026, and the Xinbi Guarantee marketplace in September 2026, each coordinated with UK and later EU listings. Sanctions do not return money to victims; they aim to make the network’s money unusable.
Ongoing charges
Ongoing charges cover management fees and the fund's running costs, deducted continuously from the fund's value, so you never see an invoice. They do not include entry or exit fees, or all trading costs. ESMA found that equity funds sold to EU retail investors between 2020 and 2024 cost 1.9% a year in total, including 1.38% of ongoing charges, against 0.5% in total for equity ETFs. Over decades, a gap of one point a year can cost more than any tax break.
Over-indebtedness
In France, a person who cannot pay their non-professional debts can file an over-indebtedness case with a commission run by the Banque de France, which can reschedule, reduce or cancel debts. Filings rose 9.8% in 2025 after 10.8% in 2024, though they remain about a third below 2015. In 2025, 16.4% of files handled included a debt linked to split payments or mini-loans, and 18 to 29 year olds made up 12% of filers, up from 5% in 2022.
PEA
The PEA (plan d’épargne en actions) is a French investment account that can hold shares and funds of companies based in the European Union or European Economic Area. After five years, gains and dividends are exempt from income tax and only bear social contributions. Deposits are capped at €150,000 (plus €225,000 in the PEA-PME variant). It is the standard vehicle for French investors buying European ETFs, and the product Finary announced in March 2026 after obtaining its investment-firm licence.
Pig butchering
The term translates the Chinese “sha zhu pan”, the scam type industrialised in Southeast Asian compounds. It differs from a classic romance scam in one respect: the victim is never asked to send money to the persona. They are led to “invest” on a platform the scammers control, shown fake gains, allowed one small withdrawal to build confidence, then pressed to deposit more, often with loans, until a “tax” or “unfreezing fee” is demanded and contact stops. The US Department of Justice used the term in the October 2025 indictment of Prince Group's chairman.
PIR (piano individuale di risparmio)
Created in 2017, the ordinary PIR accepts up to €40,000 a year and €200,000 in total. Each investment must be held for five years. At least 70% of the plan must be in instruments issued by companies resident in Italy (or EU companies with a permanent establishment there), with part of that reserved for firms outside the FTSE MIB and FTSE Mid Cap indices. If the rules are met, income and gains are exempt from the usual tax on financial income. The aim is to steer savings toward Italian small and mid-sized companies.
Programmable money
Programmable money would let an issuer restrict spending, for example to certain shops or before an expiry date. The ECB rules this out for the digital euro. It distinguishes conditional payments, which a user sets up, such as paying automatically on delivery of goods; these could be supported.
Real yield
A nominal bond yield can be split into two parts: the inflation investors expect over the bond’s life and the real return they demand on top. Inflation-protected bonds, whose principal rises with the consumer price index, trade at a yield that is the real yield directly; the difference between a normal Treasury and a TIPS of the same maturity is the market’s inflation expectation, called the breakeven rate. In 2026 almost all of the rise in US yields came from real yields, which told analysts that markets expected tighter policy and demanded more compensation, not that they expected inflation to stay high for a decade.
Recovery scam
Victim lists are traded between scam networks, so a person who has lost money is the best-qualified target there is. The FBI warned in August 2025 of fictitious law firms that claim the victim is on a government list, quote the exact amounts and dates of earlier transfers, cite invented bodies such as an “International Financial Trading Commission”, and add the victim to WhatsApp groups with fake bank staff. The French financial regulator, the AMF, has warned of callers impersonating its own employees to “help recover funds”. No legitimate authority charges a fee to return money, and none asks for crypto or gift cards.
Safeguarding
Firms that are not banks, such as payment institutions and e-money institutions, may not lend out customer money. EU rules require them to safeguard it: either keep it in a segregated account at a credit institution or invest it in secure, low-risk assets, or cover it with insurance. If the firm fails, safeguarded money is meant to be returned to customers ahead of other creditors, but there is no fixed €100,000 guarantee, and repayment can take time. Wise, Vivid, Sumeria and Nickel work this way; Trade Republic, N26, Revolut and BoursoBank are banks covered by a deposit guarantee.
Savings and investment account (SIA)
Commission Recommendation (EU) 2025/2029 of 30 September 2025 asks member states to make savings and investment accounts available through banks, investment firms and neobrokers, with online opening, no minimum deposit, eligible assets including shares, bonds and UCITS funds, fair fees, tax-free transfers between providers, and tax handled by the provider. It leaves the tax model to each country: exempting gains, deferring tax, deducting contributions, or charging a flat rate on the account value as Sweden does. It is not binding and sets no deadline.
Savings and Investments Union
The Savings and Investments Union is the European Commission's strategy, adopted on 19 March 2025, to deepen the EU's capital markets. It covers four strands: citizens and savings, investment and financing, market integration, and supervision. For savers, its main measure so far is a non-binding recommendation that member states offer simple, low-tax savings and investment accounts. The other parts, such as moving the supervision of the largest exchanges to ESMA, concern market structure rather than individual savers.
Scam compound
Scam compounds grew out of casino towns in Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos after 2020. Workers are recruited with fake job offers, held behind walls and barbed wire, and made to run scripted conversations with targets abroad; the UN put the number trapped in the region at over 300,000 in 2026. The Prince Group complaint names three of its sites, including a facility with 1,250 phones controlling 76,000 social-media accounts. Enforcement since 2025 has pushed operators into smaller, dispersed sites and into other regions rather than ending the model.
SCPI
An SCPI pools investors' money to buy and manage commercial or residential property (offices, shops, clinics, warehouses) and distributes the net rental income, typically quarterly. Shares are not listed on an exchange, so they are valued periodically by the management company and can take weeks or months to sell. SCPIs are a common line in French portfolios and one of the asset types Finary tracks, usually through manual entry or a connection to the management company.
Screen scraping
Screen scraping is the technique of programmatically logging into a website with the user's credentials and extracting information from the pages, as opposed to calling an API designed for machines. Aggregators fall back on it when a bank or broker offers no open-banking interface for a given account type. It is fragile by nature: any change to the bank's website layout or login flow can break the connection until the aggregator updates its parser. This is the reason Finary staff gave in 2026 for recurring synchronisation failures.
Section 75
Section 75 of the UK Consumer Credit Act 1974 lets a consumer claim against the lender as well as the seller for misrepresentation or breach of contract on purchases between £100 and £30,000 financed with regulated credit; section 75A gives similar rights on some linked loans. Since 15 July 2026, the FCA requires buy now, pay later providers to explain these protections before you sign.
Seigniorage
Because banknotes pay no interest while the central bank holds interest-bearing assets against them, issuing money generates income for the Eurosystem. The ECB expects seigniorage to cover the cost of the digital euro, about €1.3 billion of development until first issuance and about €320 million a year to run it, as it covers the cost of banknotes today.
Stablecoin
A stablecoin is issued by a company that holds reserves and promises one token equals one dollar or euro. Legitimate uses include trading and remittances. For criminal networks it removes the two frictions of cash: it does not swing in value like bitcoin and it moves across borders in minutes without a bank. The Prince Group complaint describes a USDT address that Chen Zhi monitored personally, and both Huione and its successor Xinbi ran Telegram guarantee marketplaces where scam proceeds in USDT were exchanged for services. Blockchain records are public, which is how investigators traced the flows afterwards.
Sycophancy
Sycophancy is the documented tendency of language-model assistants to tell users what they appear to want to hear: agreeing with a stated view, softening criticism, or changing a correct answer when the user pushes back. It arises from training on human feedback, where agreeable answers get more approval. A 2023 Anthropic study found it across five leading assistants, and in April 2025 OpenAI rolled back a ChatGPT update that had become noticeably sycophantic. For money questions it means that asking “is my plan reasonable?” invites validation, whereas asking “argue against my plan” invites the scrutiny you need.
Time-weighted return
The time-weighted return (TWR) chains together the returns of each sub-period between cash flows, so that adding or withdrawing money does not distort the figure. It is the standard for comparing a portfolio to an index or a fund manager. The money-weighted return (MWR, or internal rate of return) does the opposite: it includes the effect of when you invested, and so measures your personal outcome. Free tools such as Portfolio Performance compute both; Finary's official documentation describes only an unrealised profit-and-loss figure.
Tri-merge
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac require lenders to obtain reports from the three national credit bureaus for each borrower, and generally use the middle of the three scores. Each report carries its own score royalty, so the price per score is paid three times per borrower. In 2022 the regulator approved a switch to two reports (bi-merge), reversed it in July 2025, and in September 2026 said it was again studying two reports or even one.
Trilogue
Once the Parliament and the Council have each adopted a position on a Commission proposal, their negotiators meet in trilogues to find a compromise, which both institutions must then formally approve. On the digital euro, trilogues began on 13 July 2026; five political rounds were held by 20 October, and the Council's Irish presidency aims for an agreement by the end of 2026.
Unrealised gain
An unrealised gain (or loss) is the difference between what a position is worth now and what you paid for it, on positions you still hold. A realised gain is the same difference on positions you have sold. The distinction matters for two reasons: tax is generally due on realised gains only, and a tracker that shows unrealised gains alone, as Finary's documentation says it does, will not tell you how much you have actually made over the years once sales are included.
Waterfall and reverse waterfall
With the waterfall, any digital euros received above your holding limit would flow automatically to your linked bank account. With the reverse waterfall, a payment larger than your digital euro balance would be completed by drawing the difference from your bank account. The ECB says this lets users pay or receive amounts above the limit 'without having to prefund'.