What is KYC?
Know your customer: confirming that a customer is who they say they are before you do business with them.
KYC stands for know your customer. It is the set of checks a business runs to confirm a person’s identity before, and while, it does business with them. Anti-money laundering rules in most countries require it of banks and payment firms, and of many other businesses too: estate agents, dealers in high-value goods, gaming operators, accountants and lawyers among them.
A KYC check has three parts: collecting the person’s identity details, verifying them against an identity document or a trusted data source, and confirming that the person presenting the document is the person it belongs to. Online, that last part is a face match and a liveness check.
KYC is not a one-off. How far you go depends on the customer’s risk, and the checks are refreshed over time: when documents expire, when the customer’s circumstances change, and at intervals set by the risk you assessed.