Z-Score (Altman)

The IFRS standard that requires lessees to recognise nearly all leases on the balance sheet as a right-of-use asset and a corresponding lease liability, eliminating the previous distinction between operating and finance leases for lessees. IFRS 16 significantly impacts reported assets, liabilities, and financial ratios, and has implications for enterprise value calculations and purchase price allocations where material lease portfolios exist.

A financial metric measuring the proportion of debt in a company's capital structure relative to its earnings, equity, or assets. The most common leverage ratios in corporate finance and lending include net debt to EBITDA, debt to equity, and debt to total assets.

The legal process by which a creditor's security interest in collateral becomes enforceable against third parties, typically through registration (UCC filing, PPSA registration, or Companies House filing), possession of the collateral, or control over financial assets. Perfection establishes the creditor's priority ranking relative to other secured parties.

The process by which firms and economies accumulate intangible capital through investment in R&D, software development, training, brand building, and organisational design. Intangible capital formation is now the dominant form of business investment in advanced economies, yet it is only partially captured by national accounts and corporate balance sheets.

An international regulatory framework developed by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision that sets minimum capital requirements, leverage ratios, and liquidity standards for banks. Basel III was introduced in response to the 2008 financial crisis and requires banks to hold higher-quality capital (primarily Common Equity Tier 1) against risk-weighted assets, including operational risk and market risk.

An AI architecture that combines a large language model with an external knowledge retrieval system, enabling the model to ground its responses in verified, up-to-date information rather than relying solely on its training data. RAG reduces hallucination risk, improves factual accuracy, and allows organisations to deploy AI systems that reference proprietary knowledge bases without retraining the underlying model.

The estimated value of a business or asset beyond the explicit forecast period in a discounted cash flow analysis, representing the bulk of total enterprise value for long-lived assets. Terminal value is calculated using either a perpetuity growth model or an exit multiple approach and is particularly significant for intangible-intensive companies with long-duration competitive advantages.

A standardised set of actuarial survivor curves developed at Iowa State University that describe the retirement patterns of industrial property. Iowa curves are classified by shape (L, S, R, O types) and average service life, providing a systematic framework for modelling asset mortality.