Frequently asked questions

Know Your Customer (KYC) is the process of adhering to legal requirements for the Identification, Due Diligence & Monitoring of an organization’s customer base. These requirements are put in place to prevent organizations from dealing with individuals that may be involved with illegal activities, financial crime or have dealings with sanctioned organizations. The individual provides formal identification to the organization so that their details may be checked against a number of relevant federal databases to determine if they are known for past behaviors or if they are suspected to be participating in money laundering or other high risk illegal activities. Anti-Money Laundering (AML) in particular has very specific regulatory requirements in many regions of the world.Corruption, money laundering & even terrorist financing have become a significant reputational and financial risk for firms throughout the world, and KYC policies are a powerful tool in prevention of these activities.

Anti-money laundering (AML) refers to a set of laws, regulations, and procedures to prevent criminals from laundering illegitimate funds as legal income. While each region has different specific regulations, they cover specific transactions and behaviours. AML regulations typically stipulate that institutions issuing credit or providing financial services adhere to these rules.While KYC and AML appear to be somewhat overlapping terms, they should not be conflated to be the same thing, as AML process is significantly broader in it’s scope than KYC.

This information should not be substituted for specific legal advice. Each country and region has different requirements for compliance.

‍The Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act (2006) stipulates all relevant requirements, as well as industries that it applies to. Predominantly these are connected to specific financial activities including payroll, currency exchange or transference of funds. The regulatory body that oversees this is AUSTRAC.

International sanctions are political and economic decisions that are part of diplomatic efforts by countries, multilateral or regional organizations against states or organizations either to protect national security interests [Wikipedia].

Within Australia, Organizations and Individuals must comply with the Department of Foreign Affairs And Trade (DFAT) sanctions list, which draws from a combination of UN security council Sanctions and Autonomous Sanctions (As per the Autonomous Sanctions Act 2011). Failure to comply with this can mean significant reputational damage as well as punitive measures and fines for an organization or individual.

REST or RESTful API design (Representational State Transfer) is designed to take advantage of existing protocols. While REST can be used over nearly any protocol, it usually takes advantage of HTTP when used for Web APIs.