Hacker News Reader

Is there any accountability for overly conservative KYC? My understanding from the whole debanking thing is no, at least in the US.

View on HN

Kinda depends on how you define "accountability" of course, but rejecting paying customers is usually frowned upon in business. You want your KYC processes to be conservative enough not to get fined, but not so conservative that you lose out on potential revenue.

If you're too far off on either side, you either get fined by whatever regulator you fall under, or you get fined by the stock market because your competitors are more profitable.

Closing 1% of accounts instead of .1% of accounts for kyc reasons won't affect your revenue enough to matter to the stock market.

If you are closing 1% of your accounts every year, then you'd better be growing at more than 1% per year just to break even. If you don't have an appeal process, you'll eventually restrict everybody: Given enough time, some business/person will eventually do a weird transaction that flags them out.

There are international mechanismis for verifying that countries enforce AML stuff like KYC, but no mechanisms for measuring either how effectice it is nor what it's negative effects are.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com