Providing ID

Proving your identity

Like all banks in the Isle of Man, Zurich Bank International is licensed by the Isle of Man Financial Supervision Commission. This means we must conform with the ‘know your customer’ regulations, which exist to prevent criminals from using bank and building society accounts for money laundering.

What is money laundering?

The process criminals use to turn money made from illegal activities into clean, legitimate funds is known as ‘money laundering’. The first step for criminals is to try to put this money into a financial product like a bank or building society account often using a false identity and address.
Once they’ve done this then they can transfer the money to other accounts or use it to buy goods or services. Eventually it appears to be legitimate money and is difficult to trace to its criminal past.

Helping us to prevent money laundering

We’re required by law to prevent money laundering and are committed to doing everything we can to stop criminals using our accounts in this way.

What does this mean for you if you want to open an account with us? Well, it simply means you need to answer a few questions and send us proof of your identity.
The questions we need to ask are about:

• your occupation;
• your income;
• the amounts we can expect to see paid into and out of your account(s);
• the source of this money;
• your reason for opening the account(s);
• any other activity we can expect to see on your account(s).

As proof of your identity we’ll need:

• photographic identification;
• proof of your address;
• the source of your initial deposit.

Some additional checks may also be carried out independently, for instance with a licensed credit reference agency.  As part of the anti-money laundering requirements we need to update our customer information regularly.  This means we may need to ask you for more documents in the future if your circumstances change.