HSBC Safeguard

Fraud and financial crimes are illegal activities. They tend to involve money or property that are gained illegally, and used in a deceptive or illegal manner to 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.

HSBC Safeguard is a series of initiatives to increase the protection we provide to our customers against fraud and financial crimes across our global systems and processes. It involves strengthening our ability to combat money laundering and the evasion of sanctions, as these are often the driving force behind many financial crimes. In addition, we will no longer be offering products such as travellers’ cheques, as we believe they are no longer a safe enough way for our customers to convert their money and we may review other similar products over time.

Sanctions are a policy tool which national governments and organisations such as the United Nations and European Union use to constrain and deter perceived threats to their security, or to conform to international conduct to recognised international standards. Sanctions help to stop crimes like terrorism, drug trafficking and arms dealing by imposing restrictions on the business that banks can do with specific people, corporations or countries and the names of these are clearly listed on the Office of Foreign Assets (OFAC) sanctions list.

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

However criminal activities have 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 crimes. After all, it’s our duty to ensure 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 defence against money laundering is to prevent accounts being opened in false identities. In that connection we need to verify the origin/source of funds as part of our ongoing efforts to track our customers’ legitimate funds and to protect them from financial crimes. 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.

If you’re a personal banking customer, as a minimum, we will need two types of documents from you: one to confirm your identity and one to confirm your current address. These set of documents must be in originals and in two separate batches.

If you're a business customer, we will need to request information and documents relating to your business, including your legal entity structure, the beneficial owners and 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 doing 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 crimes. Even if as a customer you only bank in one country, locally, we have a duty to protect your account as financial crime is a global operation.

By confirming your details and ensuring that all the information we hold about you is up-to-date, you are protected from any misuse of your account and that in turn we only act on genuine requests from you.