How Banks Conduct KYC Customer Due Diligence

An accomplished financial professional for more than four decades, Gerald Michael Shaw has extensive industry experience ranging from managing financial institutions to insurance. Gerald Michael Shaw works as a global compliance officer at Dominion Bank & Trust Company Limited, where he’s in charge of a compliance and regulatory program that oversees anti-money laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) laws and regulations.

Know Your Customer (KYC) is a key financial regulatory requirement where banks and other financial institutions are required to establish guidelines for verifying, identifying, and authenticating their clients. Banks are highly regulated to prevent them from becoming targets of financial frauds and scams, as well as being used as channels for transferring illicit funds. Banks are required to conduct thorough customer identification procedures before client onboarding to safeguard themselves against money laundering.

Customer due diligence is performed with an aim of establishing whether a customer is trustworthy and assessing the risk associated with them. This process looks to uncover money laundering attempts from criminals, terrorist organizations, and politically exposed persons (PEPs). Customer due diligence is performed at three levels, which are simplified due diligence, basic due diligence, and enhanced due diligence.

Simplified due diligence is performed when there’s no need of full due diligence, since the risk of money laundering is low. For basic due diligence, the bank gathers key information for all its customers for purposes of identity verification and assessing risks associated with each customer. Finally, enhanced due diligence is performed for high risk clients where extra information is sought in order to have a clearer understanding of customer activities to mitigate associated risks.

How the Certified Compliance and Regulatory Professional Program Works

Association of International Bank Audit and Compliance Professionals
 image from aiba-us.org

Drawing on over 40 years of experience managing financial institutions and insurance entities, Gerald Michael Shaw serves as the global compliance officer at Dominion Bank and Trust Company. Gerald Michael Shaw is a Certified Compliance and Regulatory Professional (CCRP), having taken this program, first established in 2011 and developed by Pace University, in partnership with the Association of International Bank Audit and Compliance Professionals.

The CCRP program can be taken internationally, since it is offered both fully online and in-person, with a curriculum developed with courses related to regulatory affairs, corporate governance, and the development and management of company compliance programs. The classes consist of 26 sessions, totalling 80 hours of classes led by senior compliance professionals from top-tier organizations and veteran academicians.

The CCRP designation is essential for professionals in the regulatory compliance area of any financial institution, members of the audit, legal, and management consulting professions, and federal and state regulatory agency staff. Taking the CCRP courses provide professionals with valuable real-life experiences, due to the program’s approach of hands-on teaching methodology and in-depth coverage.