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Compliance overview

If you move money on behalf of your customers, you and your bank partner will work together to fulfill compliance requirements. This section explains how that works at Increase. This includes the building blocks you’ll use, key concepts, and the different forms a compliance program can take.

If you use Increase solely for your own business’s money, the customer-related responsibilities here don’t apply. In that case, see Compliance programs for what applies to your Program.

Building blocks

You represent each of your customers as an Entity. Entities are the foundation for everything else here. They’re what gets verified, monitored, and reviewed. Accounts are separate from Entities. Each Entity can have 1 or many Accounts, and every Account must be associated with an Entity.

If you rely on your bank partner to validate the information your customers submit, Increase makes Entity validations available via the API for each version of the data. You should follow up with your customer when the validation indicates a data issue.

Key concepts

Banks are required to maintain effective Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) / Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and sanctions compliance programs. A few terms come up throughout these guides:

  • Customer Identification Program (CIP): verifying the identity of customers at customer onboarding.
  • Customer Due Diligence (CDD): understanding a customer’s risk profile and expected activity.
  • Know Your Customer (KYC): customer onboarding checks plus ongoing customer monitoring.
  • Sanctions screening: preventing prohibited parties from accessing the financial system. Banks have stringent obligations here.
  • Transaction monitoring: detecting and reviewing potentially suspicious activity.

Why we collect customer information

Regardless of who legally owns a bank account, banks are generally required by regulators to have visibility into the underlying customers and activity of a Program. Because of this, we require complete and accurate information about your customers, even in account structures where your end customer is not the legal owner of the account.

Compliance programs

How these responsibilities are divided between you and the bank depends on your Program, and it takes different forms. See Compliance programs for the common models and what each means for onboarding and ongoing operations.

Questions

If you’re not sure what applies to you or what to expect, reach out to support@increase.com.