The Anti-Money Laundering Act

United Kingdom implemented a new Act on Anti-Money Laundering in 2017 on Measures against Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing (SFS 2017:630) (“AML Act”) which is based upon the Fifth EU Money Laundering Directive, which stipulates that all financial businesses, including cryptocurrency exchanges within the EU are obligated to actively prevent money laundering and financing of terrorism.

In short, the Act entails that we must make an assessment of the risk of exploitation for money laundering (also called Know Your Customer requirement (“KYC”). The Act requires us to verify the identity of all new customers when opening a customer account and before using our services. At the Annly Capital homepage, the customer may easily be identified through electronic BankID.

The law also places high demands in order to have good knowledge of the customers and their affairs. Therefore, in addition to ID verification, we must understand the purpose of the business relationship and the customer’s various transactions. If you are a business customer, we also need to know about your company’s activities, turnover and ownership. The customer may therefore be asked to complete a KYC questionnaire form on the website in order to be verified.

The Act further requires that we keep all customer information up-to-date by continuously monitoring our business relationships. That is why we might need to ask our customers to provide us with additional information whenever needed.

Particular rules apply for customers that are politically exposed persons and living abroad. Annly Capital must know whether such a customer holds a prominent political position or an important status, or if the customer is a close relative of such a person.

Customer information received by Annly Capital is treated confidentially in accordance with applicable law.

Terrorism

As with money laundering, we are obliged to report any suspicious activity to the authorities.

In order to ensure that companies operating under the AML Act are not used for terrorist financing, they are prohibited from doing business with persons or organisations on various sanctions lists. Companies are required to check against official registers of individuals and organisations that the authorities have deemed to be linked to terrorist activities. Companies must also otherwise seek to prevent the financing of terrorism.