How this site works
Normfin provides a free FinCEN AML scope checker to SEC-registered investment advisers. Every figure and every claim on this site traces back to a source below: a public SEC dataset, a real contact address, or a Federal Register citation.
Who built this
Normfin is published by Neige AI, Inc., a Delaware (USA) corporation based in San Francisco, California. hello@normfin.com is the way to reach the team about anything on this site: a result that looks wrong, a filing that has gone stale, a paragraph that reads unclear. It reaches the Neige AI team directly.
Where the data comes from
The checker reads the SEC’s own public roster of investment advisers, the same Form ADV data anyone can download from sec.gov. The roster is self-reported: each firm files its own Form ADV, and the SEC republishes the aggregate file on its own monthly schedule. The copy this site currently reads from is dated 2026-10-02. A firm that amended its filing after that date will show here as it stood on the roster date, not as it stands today. The checker result page always shows the same date so a visitor can judge for themselves.
The exact filter
A firm appears in this site’s 11,351-firm target population when three items on its own Form ADV read a specific way. SEC registration is what puts a firm inside the rule’s scope at all.
- Item 2A(1)
- has to read “Y”: the firm is SEC-registered, not state-registered
- Item 7A(1)
- has to read anything other than “Y”: no broker-dealer among the firm’s related persons
- Item 5B(2)
- has to be zero: no employee who is also a registered representative of a broker-dealer
The last two conditions are not, strictly, part of FinCEN’s own scope test. They are applied here because a firm with an affiliated broker-dealer usually has an AML program riding on that affiliate’s, one that has covered broker-dealers under the Bank Secrecy Act for two decades. Filtering those firms out keeps this site’s framing honest: a firm shown here is being told about an obligation it does not already have covered somewhere else.
How the content pages were written
The regulatory content on this site, the use-case pages and this one included, is drafted with AI assistance and then checked by hand against the Federal Register text it cites. Every regulatory quote on this site carries a pinpoint citation next to it. None is paraphrased from memory of the rule. If a quote and its citation ever disagree, the Federal Register text is the one to trust.
What this is not
This site is independent research, not legal advice, and using it creates no advisor-client or attorney-client relationship of any kind. It reads a firm’s own public Form ADV filing against FinCEN’s published rule text and reports a result; it does not review a firm’s actual compliance program, does not account for facts outside that public filing, and makes no promise about a firm’s actual compliance status. Decisions about a firm’s AML obligations should be made with qualified counsel, not from this site alone.