CXC Poll & Report on KYC & AML in corporate treasury
The new CompleXCountries (CXC) report: Corporate Treasury - Approaches & Experiences with KYC & AML has now been published.
The report, based on a detailed peer group discussion between treasurers from global MNCs based in Europe and the United States was a deep dive into the current challenges treasurers face in complying with banks' requirements for KYC and AML information and how they are handling them. There is clearly a lot more than banks could be doing to take unnecessary friction out of this process.
The peer discussion followed up on a simple LinkedIn poll which showed that, if anything KYC and AML compliance in 2025 was (even) worse than 2024 - only 23 % saying it's getting better compared to 5% saying it's getting worse.
Issues raised in the discussion included:
- Repetitive and inefficient KYC and AML data collection
- Increasing volume and scope of data requests
- Lack of consistency across banks
- Failure to adhere to agreed KYC schedules
- Surprise mid-year KYC data requests
- Duplicate and inconsistent data requests across bank entities and jurisdictions
- Requirement for hard-copy documents and document loss
- Different KYC renewal frequencies within the same banking group
- Banks citing legal or regulatory requirements without evidence
- Banks not understanding their own KYC requirements
- KYC departments in banks operating in silos and not leveraging relationship knowledge
- Requests about activities in countries unrelated to the banking relationship
- Increased scrutiny of internal controls
- Lowering of UBO reporting thresholds
- Expansion of sanctions questionnaires beyond sanctioned countries.
- Some banks such as JP Morgan and BNP Paribas were singled out as making the greatest effort to make life for their clients easier.
Banks discussed in the report included: HSBC, BNP Paribas, Bank of America, JP Morgan & Citi.
Read the report here https://www.complexcountries.com/corporate-treasury-approaches-experienc...