HSBC Safeguard

Fraud and financial crimes are often forms of theft. They tend to involve money or property that are gained illegally, and used in a deceptive or illegal manner to gain a benefit from the proceeds. In today’s complex economy, financial crimes can take many forms including money laundering, sanctions breaches, fraud, tax evasion, terrorist financing, bribery and corruption.

At HSBC, addressing financial crime globally has long been one of our main priorities.

However criminal activity has become increasingly sophisticated in recent years, and fraudsters, money launderers and others have attempted to target global networks like banks.

Improving the way we share and manage customer information will help us fight against the risk of financial crime. After all, we are committed to ensuring that you can bank with us safely, securely, and confidently.

As the world becomes more and more connected and information moves around at a greater pace, there are unfortunately greater opportunities for criminals to misuse the financial system. A key defense against money laundering is to prevent accounts being opened in false identities. We also sometimes need to verify where funds are from as part of our ongoing efforts to track our customers’ legitimate funds and to protect them from financial crime. Criminals will try to appear to be law abiding citizens or businesses and therefore we need to request documentary evidence from all of our customers in order to fully protect them and their accounts.

The documents we will need will depend on the size and nature of your business. However we are likely to need you to confirm your legal entity structure and beneficial owners as well as countries you do business with.

As more and more of our customers live, travel and trade internationally, we’re always looking for better ways to help you do the things you want to do safely. Part of this is to protect our customers around the globe. Our global systems and processes work by sharing data and customer information across borders in order to deter and detect financial crime. Even if as a customer you only bank in one country, locally, we aim to protect your account as financial crime is a global operation.

By confirming your details and making sure that all the information we hold about you is up-to-date, you can be certain that no one else is able to misuse your account and that in turn we only act on genuine requests from you.

The sole purpose of gathering this information is so that our systems and processes can protect both our customers and the bank against financial crime. We take our obligation to protect your data very seriously, so all the information you provide will be subject the HSBC Group's high data and security standards as well as applicable local law and regulation. The intent is only to use this information for your protection and will NOT be used by any third parties for marketing purposes.

In case you have been requested to provide some documentation and you are having trouble gathering this information please do let us know as soon as possible so that we can help wherever possible.

It may, for example, be possible for us to rely on alternative documents in your possession. We are required to have this information by our regulators, so please let us know if you need more time or if you have any further questions.