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Most digital nomads of my acquaintance bank in either their country of origin or in a regional hub. Getting access to an address sufficient to open a bank accou

Most digital nomads of my acquaintance bank in either their country of origin or in a regional hub. Getting access to an address sufficient to open a bank account is not terrifically difficult for socially established people who e.g. have family members in the middle class, capability to rent an apartment for at least a month and get a lease issued, etc. There are a lot of people in the community who play a bit fast and loose with taxes but from a banking perspective they’re low risk retail accounts and, even if not in technical compliance for KYC, not out of bounds for tens of percent of the retail portfolio of many banks. (Personal opinion disclaimer, yadda yadda, I would not identify as a digital nomad but have many acquaintances who do and am intimately personally and professionally acquainted with banking internationally.)

sfriedr 4y ago
How can you skip (at least parts of) KYC requirements these days? To me it seems KYC gets ever more pervasive: I had opened a bank account 5 years ago in the EU/UK space and 4 years ago closed it again. Now I opened an account again at the same bank - and the process was significantly more involved, more documentations needed to be provided for the same service, even though I had been their customer before. The KYC requirement makes me feel uneasy from a privacy point of view: If it would be an eyes-only verification, I would be happy to provide a lot of data to prove I'm not a bad guy. But since the data gets stored and potentially forwarded to third parties, this significantly increases my risk for data and identity theft, as number of increasing data breaches show: https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/96667-the-top-data-breaches-of-2021 https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/96667-the-top-data... And there is also a long-term risk associated with excessive KYC data hoarding about individuals: The atrocities in Nazi Germany were in part possible because the government gathered data about the Jewish population (e.g. by enacting essentially KYC-like requirements for its citizens; though I guess through this lense the word should be "KYJ") and then subsequently used that data to round them up: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/locating-the-victims https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/locating-t... Also, what do you mean by "not out of bounds for tens of percent of the retail portfolio of many banks"
deleted 4y ago
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sfriedr 4y ago

How can you skip (at least parts of) KYC requirements these days? To me it seems KYC gets ever more pervasive: I had opened a bank account 5 years ago in the EU/UK space and 4 years ago closed it again. Now I opened an account again at the same bank - and the process was significantly more involved, more documentations needed to be provided for the same service, even though I had been their customer before. The KYC requirement makes me feel uneasy from a privacy point of view: If it would be an eyes-only verification, I would be happy to provide a lot of data to prove I'm not a bad guy. But since the data gets stored and potentially forwarded to third parties, this significantly increases my risk for data and identity theft, as number of increasing data breaches show: https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/96667-the-top-data-breaches-of-2021 https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/96667-the-top-data... And there is also a long-term risk associated with excessive KYC data hoarding about individuals: The atrocities in Nazi Germany were in part possible because the government gathered data about the Jewish population (e.g. by enacting essentially KYC-like requirements for its citizens; though I guess through this lense the word should be "KYJ") and then subsequently used that data to round them up: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/locating-the-victims https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/locating-t... Also, what do you mean by "not out of bounds for tens of percent of the retail portfolio of many banks"

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]