The illogical proof of address system: is it really required by law?

SouthLondonUser

Heng_Leng wrote: »

The 3 easiest ones are:

Driving Licence - some will accept as sole ID along with electronic checks.
Energy Bill - these are usually quarterly anyway and often free.
Council Tax - normally accepted in current tax year.

Other things can be set for paper but I don't like providing bank or credit card statements for privacy reasons.

It's not as easy. Not everyone accepts a driving licence as proof of address: they say you might have moved in the meanwhile.
Energy bills: they are online only. The company doesn't provide paper statements.
The water bill is a paper bill, but it's in my name only. We must have called some 10 times to have my wife added, and every single time they fail to do it.
Council tax: not accepted because older than 3 months.

SouthLondonUser

Don80 wrote: »

Short answer - yes it is a legal requirement (I worked for a bank some years ago). Banks are bound by anti money laundering regulations which require them to check your identity.

Yes, but what do laws and regulations actually say?

Do they say: you must require proofs of address, you cannot accept mobile phone statements, you can accept letters from this government department but not that one, etc. or do they just say banks have to verify, and then banks have come up with this requirement for proofs of address?

THIS is the question.

We must be speaking a different language... I don't need to be told for the billionth time that regulations require identity verification. I know that already, and it's been reiterated countless times in this thread. Thank you very much, but that's not the question.

Since I don't think Monzo is in blatant violations of all rules and regulations, my two cents is that it is simply interpreting the rules differently, and that nowhere in the rules does it say that identity must be verified with proofs of address. This is my two cents, of course. I'd appreciate it if someone who knows more could elaborate, but hearing for the trillionth time that "banks have the obligation to verify identity" is not particularly useful.

SouthLondonUser

tenchy wrote: »

"Sadly the government screwed that up completely".


No. THANKFULLY the government screwed that up completely.


Do you really want to be under total state surveillance? It's bad enough as it is, without ID cards. Heaven knows how bad it would be with them.

What additional surveillance powers would the governemnt have had with identity cards?

British intelligence already has way more powers than their counterparts in most of Continental Europe, where they have ID cards and a population register.

Credit reference agencies already collect and share way more data here than in Continental Europe.

Most of Continental Europe has ID cards, a population register, less surveillance than the UK, and does not require proofs of address. AFAIK frauds are not ten times more frequent in the Continent than here. Do you know differently? If anything, faking a proof of address is way easier than hacking into the population register, and Monzo's type of verification is more fraud-proof than proofs of address.

Without an ID card system, getting a passport becomes de facto compulsory in order to prove identity and citizenship. Really, how do you prove your child is British otherwise? You can request a certificate confirming your citizenship, but it costs even more than a passport! (£234 currently: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/607005/NationalityFeesLeaflet_2017.pdf )

If you have never lived anywhere else it may be unnatural to even think of alternatives, but if you have ever lived on the continent, or spoken to people who do/did, you'd realise how many things in our system make very little sense...

SouthLondonUser

batrachophagus wrote: »

If you admit to having a shared mailbox you will also find it very difficult to open an account with some financial institutions.

Right. Everyone who has a shared mailbox does, Sure. This would automatically disqualify... possibly 1/3 of London's population!

I lived in a flat in a small block, where the mailboxes were open, so it was possible to steal your neighbour's post. This arrangement is very common in many, many parts of London. I did open accounts while tehre, and not once was I asked whether I had any kind of shared mailbox.

batrachophagus

SouthLondonUser wrote: »

Right. Everyone who has a shared mailbox does, Sure. This would automatically disqualify... possibly 1/3 of London's population!

I lived in a flat in a small block, where the mailboxes were open, so it was possible to steal your neighbour's post. This arrangement is very common in many, many parts of London. I did open accounts while tehre, and not once was I asked whether I had any kind of shared mailbox.

Fair enough. I did say some though. I have recently read that First Direct have refused current account customers for shared mailbox only.

eskbanker

SouthLondonUser wrote: »

Yes, but what do laws and regulations actually say?

Do they say: you must require proofs of address, you cannot accept mobile phone statements, you can accept letters from this government department but not that one, etc. or do they just say banks have to verify, and then banks have come up with this requirement for proofs of address?

THIS is the question.

The law itself isn't particularly prescriptive - regulation 5 of the Money Laundering Regulations 2007 simply refers to customer due diligence encompassing:

identifying the customer and verifying the customer’s identity on the basis of documents, data or information obtained from a reliable and independent source

while generic government guidance on customer due diligence aspects of anti-money laundering includes:

Customer due diligence means taking steps to identify your customers and checking they are who they say they are. In practice this means obtaining a customer’s:

• name
• photograph on an official document which confirms their identity
• residential address and date of birth

The best way to do this is to ask for a government issued document like a passport, along with utility bills, bank statements and other official documents. Other sources of customer information include the electoral register and information held by credit reference agencies such as Experian and Equifax.

Banks themselves are obviously regulated by the FCA who then add further layers of guidance, but it's complex to navigate and I gave up - if you're motivated to do so yourself then start at https://www.handbook.fca.org.uk/handbook but don't expect highly-specific detailed instructions because, as per earlier posts, there is still clearly quite a lot of implementation discretion available to individual institutions!

Documents like https://www.handbook.fca.org.uk/handbook/document/fc/FC1_FCA_20140612.pdf are typical, stressing the need for controls rather than actually spelling out the minimum standard.

Perhaps those with actual experience of working within this regulatory regime can comment further but in answer to your original question, proof of address sits somewhere in between specific legal requirement and inconvenient convention....

Hedgehog99

Even more annoying is that we go through these ever more convoluted palavers whereas anyone up to no good still seems to get though with fake documents.

It can be annoying if you have only just moved and haven't yet got enough of the suitable documents showing your new address.

But I'd still rather this than ID cards or microchips.

SouthLondonUser

Hedgehog99 wrote: »

But I'd still rather this than ID cards or microchips.

Why? As per my previous reply, what would exactly change with an ID card, what more surveillance would we be subject to?

jonesMUFCforever

SouthLondonUser wrote: »

@boo_star , The question was not whether you are happy with the proof of address system, or whether you would apply to Monzo. The question was whether demanding proof of address is a legal requirement, or simply a convention applied by all except the challenger banks. Does any one know? Is there any one with a legal or compliance background?

@JonesMUFCf , not everything is online, but many things are. At least for us. Many companies charge extra if you want paper bills, which, by the way, I wouldn't want unless they were needed for this Bizantine proof of address system.
In our case:

• we receive no benefits whatsoever;
• the council tax bill is older than 3 months, so won't be accepted, but the council sends it annually only;
• the water bill is older than 3 months but we haven't received the new one yet;
• gas and electricity are online only;
• we have bank statements, but we cannot use them as proof of address because the lenders use them to verify our expenses: all the lenders I have contacted said so. There might be some lenders who behave differently but I honestly don't have the time to spend 20 more hours in call centre hell to find out.
• we should be able to get a paper credit card statement (I'll call the bank today) but we need another proof of address, and we have no idea where to get it.

In other words, just because it is straightforward for you doesn't mean it is always straightforward for all...

1. Telephone your local tax office and get a letter confirming your tax code for the year - this is accepted by most banks to confirm address.
2. Are you sure the broker requires a local authority tax bill to be less than 3 months old - all the banks I have applied for only asks that it be from the current year (as you state it is only issued annually).
3. I have no idea what you mean by the bank not accepting your bank statements as they use them to verify your expenses - sorry that has lost me completely.

SouthLondonUser

I need to submit my bank statements to prove my salary, my expenses, etc. In a mortgage application. My broker tells me some lenders do not let applicants use bank statements as proof of address because bank statements are already used for this other purpose.