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# Advanced

> The controls on the Advanced tab that apply to every request at once: region and vendor restrictions for data sovereignty, plus zero data retention, request tags, model migrations, and context compression.

The [Advanced tab](https://wf-develop.merge.dev/models/advanced) is one card per organization-wide model control: zero data retention, vendor regions, request tags, model migrations, vendor controls, and context compression. Nothing here is scoped to a Group: a change applies to every employee request on the next call. Vendor regions is the card most organizations configure first, so it is covered in full below.

> **Advanced is not enabled yet**
>
> The tab is off for every organization and appears only behind a per-organization demo flag, where it runs on sample figures and writes nothing to Gateway. The controls below describe the shape of each setting, not something you can change from Workforce today. Set them in the Merge Gateway console until the tab ships.

## Vendor regions

Region restrictions decide which vendors Gateway may route to based on where the vendor's infrastructure sits. Use them to keep GDPR-covered traffic on EU vendors, or to exclude a region your legal team has not cleared.

Every vendor in the catalog carries two attributes set by Merge: an ISO-3166 country code (`US`, `FR`, `CN`) and a coarser region bucket (`NA`, `EU`, `APAC`, `CN`). A token you enter matches a vendor when it equals either one.

| List                | Effect                                                                                             |
| ------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Allowed regions** | Only vendors matching a token in this list are routable. Vendors with no region tags are excluded. |
| **Ignored regions** | Vendors matching a token in this list are excluded. Vendors with no region tags are kept.          |

The asymmetry is deliberate. An allow list fails closed, so moving from open routing to a strict allow list never silently permits something Gateway does not recognize as in-region. The two lists cannot share a token, and a configuration that puts the same one in both is refused on save.

When a region bucket is too coarse, the same card takes per-vendor allow and deny lists. That is the lever for "EU vendors are fine, except this one whose new sub-processor list has not been approved yet."

Region filters run after blocklist rules and before your routing policy, so the policy chooses among whatever survives. If the filter empties the candidate pool, the request fails with no eligible vendor rather than falling back to an excluded vendor.

> **Region controls target the vendor, not the employee**
>
> They restrict where data is sent, not where the request came from. An employee in Berlin and one in Denver hit the same allowed vendors.

Each vendor's country and region is published on [Provider terms](/merge-gateway/security/provider-terms), which is the source of truth for what your tokens will match.

## The other cards

| Card                    | What it does                                                                                                                                          |
| ----------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Zero data retention** | Restricts routing to vendors under a ZDR agreement. See [Zero data retention](/merge-gateway/security/zero-data-retention) for which vendors qualify. |
| **Request tags**        | Defines the key-value pairs requests can carry, for spend breakdowns and [tag-based routing](/merge-workforce/models/routing)                         |
| **Model migrations**    | Moves traffic from a baseline model to a candidate so you can retire a model without editing every policy                                             |
| **Vendor controls**     | Vendor-level allow and deny lists, and whether Gateway migrates you to a successor model automatically                                                |
| **Context compression** | Trims oversized histories and minifies tool payloads before requests leave. See [Context compression](/merge-gateway/cost/context-compression).       |

Setting a model as a migration **baseline** is always allowed, even for a vendor you have lost access to. Migrating off a vendor is exactly what you need to be able to do in that case.

## Next

Every change on this tab is recorded, so check who changed a region list and when in the [audit trail](/merge-workforce/logs/audit-trail).