Money Laundering Regs - "two pieces of ID"

I'm sure this is correct. I'm also sure that the call centre people have been told by the bank they work for (or whoever) that two bits of ID must be seen and nothing else will do, that is what their 'discretion' has lead to. A lot easier to quantify than to make a value judgement, and thus a lot easier to show you have done what the government asked (irrespective of how useful it is in actually reducing fraud, which is probably not at all)

One bunch of fuckwits come up with crap regulation, it is implemented as even crappier requirements by a different set of fuckwits, and the only people that are inconvenienced are us, the non-money-laundering general public. The money launderers will of course be able to provide fraudulent ID easily. So we get stories such as people who for example, already have an account with a bank and are asked to provide this kind of ID when they want to open up a different type of account with the same financial institution, even the same branch, as they currently have, and are refused when they dont happen to have a gas bill etc on them as they assumed that actually ahving the account at the bank would ID them. But they are perfectly at liberty to withdraw all the money as cash and walk away. Fuckwits is the only term that describes the people running these institutions. "No Mr Terrorist you may not xfer money from account A to account B both at my bank, but I'm quite happy for you to take it all as untraceable cash and walk away"

rant over....for now.

The Banks have a list of suitable ID they can accept (dictated to them by Government) which consists of one piece to identify someone ie Passport or Driving licence and something else to confirm their address (ie where they actually live, before anyone else starts on that stupid post again!). Banks do conduct a credit search when opening an account for new customers and many will dispense with the second piece of ID if your address can be verified via the electoral roll. Eric

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In both cases you have supplied 2 pieces. The electoral roll is your address verification, and the cheque is your signature verification.

Er, quite :-)

That's why I've been attempting to avoid doing business with the ones that take the easy way out. I think you've confirmed that it's perfectly legal to apply the regs a bit more intelligently - it's just a shame that so few of them do so.

OK - can you cite chapter and/or verse on the exact legal requirement? I see *nothing* in the Money Laundering regs that do this.

Right. I guess the bee in my bonnet is that those two pieces of information are available to any institution that's willing to take the trouble to find them - although most of them don't seem to want to bother - and they don't require me to produce certified copies of documents that are none of their damn' business. The cheque might be particularly significant, because it's implicit (assuming that it's honoured) that there's a UK bank acting as an independent signature verifier.

That's what I thought, however after the latest Natwest incident (see the post about 2-3 weeks ago), I applied for an Alliance & Leicester account (Premier Plus).

Two very notable things

1) After filling in the A&L application, I wasn't asked to send any ID at all (both Abbey and Halifax have in the past). I can only guess that they only verified via the electrol roll (perhaps something else?) because I didn't opt to pay my salary in, provide any other bank account details, or transfer any direct debits (1) 2) It actually took A&L 1 day less to open a new account than Natwesst to send me a new card for an existing account!

Regards Mark

(1) Even tho Natwest has been bad the last few weeks, I still want to maintain an 18y account, purely because of buying a house when its the right time :o)

A colleague was told last week that she could not change sterling to Euros at travel agents without two forms of ID. This is taking the piss.

In message , Tumbleweed wrote

Halifax building society! I had two accounts with them and their literature said that I could view my these on-line. They allowed me to go through the all on-line sign-up and then wanted two proofs of ID sent by posts before they would activate it.

Guess how many Halifax accounts I now have?

It is indeed, but this thread I think has confirmed that it's not a direct result of the Money Laundering Regs themselves, but of the policies/procedures that many travel agents and others have invented to comply with them.

I assume they asked for an opening deposit. If you made it by cheque, then it sounds pretty much like the experience I had with ING and Northern Rock.

No opening deposit asked for either!

Unless they just wait until you pay in a the first cheque / transfer into the account, and use that as the second check without the customer knowing?

In message , A Dodger writes

My understanding is that there must be 2 pieces of ID information - 1 with a photo, e.g. passport, driving license, and 1 with address, e.g. council tax or utility bill. Failure to comply with the MR regs is a criminal offence with a max sentence of either 7 or 15 years, (not sure which). The penalties fall on individuals as well as the company.

I think you are fighting the law rather than policy and, whether there is any discretion or not, you cant blame them for avoiding the risk of

15 years in prison?

Another thing you should be aware of is that if they are suspicious of your motives, they are obliged to report you to NCIS, (not sure of the acronym, but they looked pretty serious when I researched this in February), without your knowledge.

My info came from recommendations by the RICS, amongst others, along with an attempt to open a new account at my current bank without ID - why reinvent the wheel?

See my response to your other post; I assumes RICS = chartered surveyors?

I'm still trying to get to where the "there must be 2 pieces of ID" comes from. It *doesn't* come from the MLR; this is an edited extract from paragraph 4(3), which defines the required identification procedures:

"A [the regulated institution] must maintain identification procedures which...require that as soon as is reasonably practicable after contact is first made between A and B [the individual]...B must produce satisfactory evidence of his identity"

There is no further definition of "satisfactory" anywhere that I can find. So as far as I can see, all that A has to do is maintain a procedure - write it, train their employees to use it, maybe actually tell their customers about it, audit their employees to make sure it does actually get used, etc. The procedure could simply say "if the customer's hair is is green, he's OK".

That's clearly ridiculous, but a procedure that says - "if Experian have heard of them, they're OK" seems, from my and others experiences, to be "satisfactory" for at least some institutions. Others, perhaps on the (non legally binding) recommendation of RICS, and/or other trade bodies, have decided that only "two pieces of ID" are "satisfactory".

If the law doesn't define "satisfactory", then any good faith attempt by an institution to define their own practicable identification procedure must be good enough - until, perhaps, a case gets in front of a judge. That may result in tighter definitions being mandated (by case law) thereafter, but there still shouldn't be any scope for penalising the folk who were prepared to use more relaxed tests until that point.

Sure, that's in Section 7 of the MLR (reporting). In fact the identification procedure (Section 4) is only supposed to be applicable at all if the proposed transaction(s) exceed 15,000 euros - *or* if they think they've already got grounds for suspecting you of money- laundering.

I think I shall pursue this in uk.legal.moderated....

In message , A Dodger writes

Yes. The British Bankers Association. (See previous threads here). On behalf of their members and also, I think, the Building Societies association the BBA established Joint Money Laundering Steering Group which was set up to try and figure out what the Govt actually wanted and to ensure a 'level playing field' for all deposit takers. It set the standards that we see today. The link is

In common with a lot of 'law passing' these days especially in the fields of banking, financial services and corporate governance, the state just says "make sure you do it properly or else...." without defining what 'doing it properly' should be.

Not case law as such, but a whopping fine for RBS about a year ago I think.

You have in effect provided the two forms by way of electoral roll and the cheque (so long as it doesnt bounce with the answer 'signature differs'.

Best of luck!

I have just been involved in something, where a search on the electoral roll was considered an adequate check for opening an account.

Thank you! Since I'm not prepared to shell out 50 to see the guidelines themselves, I shall take a guess that that's where the "2 pieces of ID" comes from. But it's comforting to see that that JMLSG themselves accept that these guidelines cannot be mandatory.

This government excels at form over substance.

I've now found

with an interesting "note for editors" saying

"Documents that can be used to verify a customers identity - that is, his or her name and address - are set out in the Joint Money Laundering Steering Group Guidance Notes and include a valid passport, a driving licence and a recent utility bill."

which seemingly has the FSA deferring to the JMLSG on a non-exclusive set of documents that "can be" acceptable.

I get the impression the fine had as much to do with inadequate record keeping as it did with failing to make checks in the first place.

Yes I know - as I said in another post, it's a lot less painful for it to be done this way than to have to hand out copies of documents that are at least notionally private (utility bills and so forth).

Again - thank you.