Know your customer (KYC) is the process of a business verifying the identity of its clients.

The term is also used to refer to the bank regulation which governs these activities. Know your customer processes are also employed by companies of all sizes for the purpose of ensuring their proposed agents, consultants, or distributors are anti-bribery compliant. Banks, insurers and export creditors are increasingly demanding that customers provide detailed anti-corruption due diligence information, to verify their probity and integrity.

Know your customer policies are becoming much more important globally to prevent identity theft, financial fraud, money laundering and terrorist financing.

The objective of KYC guidelines is to prevent banks from being used, intentionally or unintentionally, by criminal elements for money laundering activities.

Related procedures also enable banks to better understand their customers and their financial dealings.

This helps them manage their risks prudently.

Banks usually frame their KYC policies incorporating the following four key elements:

For the purposes of a KYC policy, a Customer/user may be defined as:

KYC controls typically include the following:

Enhanced due diligence (EDD) is a more detailed standard required for larger customers and transactions.

The USA PATRIOT Act dictates that institutions "shall establish appropriate, specific, and, where necessary, enhanced, due diligence policies, procedures, and controls that are reasonably designed to detect and report instances of money laundering through those accounts." ^[666666] US regulations require that EDD measures are applied to account types such as Private banking, Correspondent account, and Offshore banking institutions. Because regulatory definitions are neither globally consistent nor prescriptive, financial institutions are at risk of being held to differing standards dependent upon their jurisdiction and regulatory environment. An article published by Peter Warrack in the July 2006 edition of ACAMS Today (Association of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists) suggests the following: "A rigorous and robust process of investigation over and above (KYC) procedures, that seeks with reasonable assurance to verify and validate the customer’s identity; understand and test the customer’s profile, business and account activity; identify relevant adverse information and risk; assess the potential for money laundering and / or terrorist financing to support actionable decisions to mitigate against financial, regulatory and reputational risk and ensure regulatory compliance."

Generally this means consistent, thorough and accurate.

The process must be documented and available for inspection by regulators.

The process must be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timebound), ^[666666] scalable and proportionate to the risk and resources.

EDD files rely upon initial client screening.

EDD processes should use a tiered approach dependent upon the risk.

Crucial to the integrity of any EDD process is the reliability of information and information sources, the type and quality of information sources used, properly trained analysts who know where to look for information, how to look and how to corroborate, interpret and decide the results.

Commercial intelligence companies aggregate this information and compile it daily into a comprehensive database.

Many of these commercial intelligence companies are serviced by in-country providers with researchers on the ground who can obtain information that is not otherwise easily accessible.

What is reasonable depends upon factors including jurisdiction, risk, resources, and technology state of the art.

For sanction matches it depends upon information provided by regulators.

In all cases the suggested standard is to the civil standard of proof i.e. on the balance of probability.

Information obtained from any source, including the Internet, free and subscription databases and the media, which is directly or indirectly indicative of involvement in money laundering, terrorist financing or predicate offenses.

Examples include fraud and other dishonesty, drug trafficking, smuggling or other proscribed offenses, references to money laundering, or conducting business, residing in or frequenting countries deemed by the Financial Action Task Force and/or (institution) as being countries under sanction or countries with which (institution) does not do business; to official sanctions or watch lists; and to investigations, convictions or disciplinary findings by authorized regulatory bodies.