Comment by always2slow
1 year ago
>Banking is the first industry where I encountered KYC, and it strikes me as being obviously good there.
This is not obvious to me as my experience has been largely negative post-KYC/9-11 vs pre-KYC/9-11. I am a legal law abiding citizen [and voter!] and it's just added extra hassle on various occasions and then the background anxiety of knowing an institution with crappy security track records hold a photocopy of my ID. And yet all the things KYC was supposed to prevent still continue unabated: money laundering, terrorist financing, identity theft, and financial fraud.
I'm curious to hear why you think it's obviously good and if you were using these services before KYC.
The people who donated to the Canadian truckers' protest had their accounts frozen by the Trudeau regime because of KYC.
The problem is that there are no checks and balances preventing banks from freezing assets because they want to or the government told them to.
Banking needs to be a right, and unless someone is convicted of a crime involving the bank account's assets, banks and governments should not be able to freeze them. There can be exceptions for fraud like FTX where there will be a significant financial harm to other individuals if the assets aren't frozen, but what we have today is unchecked government financial terrorism against individuals they do not like, and now they want to extend that terrorism to speech.
I am familiar with KYC from a banker's perspective (at least that of a close relative who was a bank manager).
KYC helped them by deny-listing abusive clients between branches, or by allowing the bank to develop heuristics for things like allowing customers to bypass cheque clearing times.
From an end-user perspective, I've had no hangups personally but I do share your grievances about yet-another-shoddy institution holding a photocopy of my ID. My bank truncates passwords when setting them, and when logging in, without telling the user. It boggles the mind.
Thanks for replying I appreciate the insight, although as someone else mentioned the most obvious use (to me) for KYC is censorship / de-banking and I think that was it's intended purpose all along because there's nothing about KYC that specifically enables the two things you mentioned that couldn't be done by a bank on it's own.
The bank can choose to require such identification of their customers for their own business purposes independent of any regulation requiring them to do so.