Fraud and financial crimes are 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. Therefore, it is even more important for us to be vigilant in protecting our customers wherever they are in the world.

HSBC Safeguard is a series of initiatives to increase the protection we provide our customers against fraud and financial crime 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 drivers behind many financial crimes. In addition, we will be reviewing our products from time to time to ensure that we do not offer products that do not provide sufficient protection for our customers, such as travellers' cheques.

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 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 resources like the Office of Foreign Assets (OFAC) sanctions list.

At HSBC, addressing financial crime globally has long been one of our priorities. It is our duty to ensure that you can bank with us safely, securely and confidently. Improving the way we share and manage customer information will help us continue to fight effectively against such risks and prevent criminals from penetrating the banking system.

As the world becomes increasingly connected and technologically advanced, there are unfortunately greater opportunities for the misuse of the financial system. A key defence against money laundering is to prevent accounts being opened in false identities. We also sometimes need to verify the origin of the funds as part of our ongoing efforts to track our customers' legitimate funds. 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 are a personal banking customer, we are likely to need two types of documents from you: one to confirm your identity and one to confirm your current address. These need to be two separate documents and need to be originals, not copies.
If you are a business customer, the documents we need will depend on the size and nature of your business. Examples of documents that we may need include your company's legal entity structure, list of beneficial owners, and/or countries you do business with.

Our global systems and processes work by sharing data and customer information across borders in order to deter and detect financial crime. Even if you bank in only one country, we are still committed locally 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, it reduces the risks of your accounts being misused and in turn, we will be able to verify that we are acting on genuine instructions from you.