As regulations tighten around anti-money laundering and financial crime, Know Your Customer (KYC) due diligence is crucial for businesses to avoid severe penalties.
Global Investigations provides professional KYC screening and enhanced due diligence services to validate customer identities and ensure regulatory compliance.
Who Might Need KYC Checks?
Any business dealing with customer transactions may require KYC services to confirm identities and prevent financial crime. This includes:
> Financial Institutions: Banks, lenders, payments companies, and other financial services providers are mandated to perform KYC checks under anti-money laundering regulations. Our services ensure all customers are properly vetted.
> Accountancy Firms: Accountants managing client funds require client due diligence to avoid unknowingly enabling money laundering. Our KYC expertise provides the necessary safeguards and compliance.
> Legal Firms: Law practices forming business entities, managing estates/wills, facilitating transactions, or handling client funds need client screening and monitoring to detect suspicious activity.
> Corporate Services Firms: Companies providing fiduciary services around company formations, bank account openings, or ownership structures need rigorous KYC procedures in place to fulfil compliance duties.
Any business dealing with client funds or transactions has exposure and obligations around KYC. Our private investigators facilitate compliance.
How Do KYC Checks Work?
Our KYC due diligence process involves:
> Identity Verification: Confirming authentic government IDs, cross checking information against databases like credit checks, validating addresses, and more to corroborate customer information.
> Background Screening: Researching customer history including connections, past legal issues, sources of wealth, public records, and more to build a risk profile assessing potential for money laundering or other financial crimes.
> Ongoing Monitoring: Continuously tracking customer transaction activity, updating due diligence information, and watching for suspicious transactions to maintain compliance over the full relationship lifecycle per regulations.
Using legal methods and our access to global records and data sources, our expert investigators leave no stone unturned in confirming customer identities, histories, and behaviour to facilitate compliance.
Why Trust Global Investigations for KYC Checks?
With over 20 years of experience, our professional team of licensed private investigators have extensive expertise specifically around financial crime matters. We stay fully up-to-date on the latest regulations and requirements to ensure our KYC services surpass obligations.
As a trusted industry leader, Global Investigations maintains an expansive global database and information network to dig deeper than competitors into customer backgrounds across 100+ countries. We uncover hidden connections, activities, legal issues and more.
Our commitment to integrity, security, and discretion makes us a reliable partner for managing sensitive customer information and due diligence data. We ensure full compliance with DPA, GDPR, data regulations, and all other relevant regulations.
Enhanced Due Diligence
For high-risk clients, our enhanced due diligence provides more rigorous identity confirmation, deeper background screening, and additional verification procedures as mandated by regulations. We tailor our process to your specific industry and risk factors.
Ongoing Monitoring
Per regulations, customer screening and monitoring is required continuously not just at onboarding. Our investigators handle ongoing due diligence like transaction analysis, ad hoc screenings, re-verifications, and other monitoring to maintain compliance.
KYC Compliance Consulting
Beyond outsourced screening, our financial crime experts can consult on improving in-house KYC procedures, system selection, process design, control frameworks, audits, and staff training to strengthen capabilities. We identify gaps and provide guidance.
See Also:
• Asset Tracing
• Due Dilligence
• Bug Sweeping
KYC Checks Frequently Asked Questions
We utilise legal methods to access government, financial, corporate, media databases across 100+ countries along with conducting interviews and site visits globally to build complete customer profiles.
Red flags include information inconsistencies, connections to risky entities, linked to crime or corruption, opaque ownership structures, unusual transactions, ties to sanctioned regions, missing documentation, unwillingness to provide information, and more.
Insufficient identity confirmation, background screening, and monitoring can result in money laundering, terrorist financing, or other financial crimes passing through a business – leading to major fines, criminal prosecutions, licence revocations, and existential threats if obligations aren’t met.
For higher-risk clients, we conduct extended identity confirmation, expanded background screening including associates, more detailed source of wealth validation, periodic status re-verification, and bespoke ongoing monitoring per specific risk scenarios.