KYC applies everywhere that wants to stop, or even to appear to care about, corruption. Perhaps, but it's also a great cover story for banks to pry into more o

KYC applies everywhere that wants to stop, or even to appear to care about, corruption. Perhaps, but it's also a great cover story for banks to pry into more of your personal or business details than they really have any need or right to know. For example, one of my businesses in the UK was flagged for a KYC procedure by its bank after several years with them. We'd provided the usual basic information about the business and its officers when opening the facilities with them. Nothing unusual had happened recently to suggest a significant change. And yet suddenly, we're getting annoying pop-ups every time we go onto online banking, demanding that we complete an extensive and poorly presented questionnaire that seemed to want far more information than any bank had apparently required to "know" us previously. As it turned out, it was less trouble to go to a competing bank, open an entire set of replacement facilities there by providing similar basic information to what we'd given our previous bank before, and then close everything with the original bank. In case anyone is wondering, HSBC was the offending bank, and for this and several other reasons, I would actively recommend against them for anyone in the UK who needs to set up business banking facilities.