Know Your Customer (KYC)
Know Your Customer (KYC) is the checks a regulated business runs to verify a customer's identity before it lets them transact — proving who they are.
Know Your Customer, or KYC, is the set of identity checks a regulated business must run before letting a customer transact — verifying that a person is who they claim to be, using documents and data.
How it works
- The customer supplies identifying details and, usually, a government ID; the business verifies them against trusted sources.
- Checks are risk-based: higher-risk customers get more scrutiny, and verification is refreshed over time, not done once and forgotten.
- KYC on an individual has a business counterpart, KYB, which verifies a company rather than a person.
It sits under the broader anti-money laundering regime — KYC is how a firm knows who it’s dealing with.
Why it matters
For a marketplace or platform, onboarding is a tension: too little verification invites fraud and regulatory trouble, too much friction and sellers drop out before they earn a penny. Every extra form and redirect costs conversions, yet skipping checks isn’t an option for a regulated flow. Getting KYC right — thorough but low-friction — directly affects both risk and growth.
How Fynex does it
As an FCA-authorised e-money institution, Fynex runs KYC and KYB inside your own onboarding flow, so sellers verify without being bounced to a third party. See seller onboarding.