When you come on board as a new client, you will be asked to send us some personal information or documentation for the purposes of a money laundering check. Don’t worry, this is all part of our standard client onboarding process, and a requirement of all clients in line with the Government’s Anti Money Laundering Regulations, updated in January 2020.
The EU’s 5th Money Laundering Directive requires us to perform Know Your Customer (KYC) and Customer Due Diligence (CDD) checks on all of our clients (including potential clients).
The main purpose of KYC policies and programs is to prevent identity theft, fraud, money laundering and terrorist financing.
Anti money laundering procedures are important in promoting best practice in companies, and in our economy as a whole. When effectively put in place, these controls mitigate the effects of criminal economic activity and promote integrity in business – something we all benefit from in society.
For this reason, all financial institutions and other regulated companies must perform checks in order to identify their clients and ascertain relevant information pertinent to doing financial business with them.
We need to verify that our clients are who they say they are and to check that the company and its directors are properly registered according to UK legislation.
When we initially discuss working with you, we’ll send you our client questionnaire
The initial questionnaire is used for general information gathering, but also to enable us to carry out the basic checks as required by the Money Laundering Regulations. We’ll be asking you for some personal details (name, date of birth, etc) and for the important information about your business, like the nature of business and important numbers and dates.
It will help to have the following numbers handy:
- Your VAT number
- Your PAYE reference number
- Number of employees
In addition, we will ask you for:
- A passport or driving license with photograph, full name and date of birth; and
- An original recent (< 3 months) utility bill, or government issued document
These can be sent to us as a photo attached to the questionnaire document or sent separately to emma@freshfinancials.com
We use 2 separate software products to verify both the directors, and the company information.
These are:
AMLCC; and
These databases continually monitor risk assessment and will update us in the event of any status changes that we should be aware of. This ensures that we remain compliant with AML Regulations.
Internally, Fresh Financials has its own AML policies and procedures. As every transaction is manually reconciled, (and nothing is reconciled without the relevant documentation), we can be certain of providing transparency regarding the validity of all our clients’ transactions.
All our staff are trained and their knowledge updated as legislation changes. And any documentation is safely filed for the seven years as required by law.
Any information we gather will be secure in line with GDPR
We take the confidentiality of our clients’ information very seriously. Any paperwork, passport or data we receive from you is filed carefully within encoded files, accessible only to those with the authority to access it.
To access a copy of Fresh Financials Anti-Money Laundering Policy, click here.