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Customer due diligence (CDD)

The ongoing obligation to understand the nature and purpose of a customer relationship, build a risk profile, and monitor activity for transactions inconsistent with that profile.

Identification answers who the customer is; due diligence answers what they are expected to do. A retail account funded from salary that suddenly receives third-party wires from several jurisdictions has departed from its profile, and the monitoring system is designed to notice.

Requirements scale with risk. Low-risk retail accounts get automated monitoring; higher-risk categories such as a politically-exposed-person, offshore entities or cash-intensive businesses get enhanced-due-diligence with senior sign-off and periodic review.

Reviews are refreshed periodically and on trigger events, which is why long-standing customers are occasionally asked to re-confirm employment, income and source-of-funds.

Related: customer-identification-program, enhanced-due-diligence, politically-exposed-person, source-of-funds, anti-money-laundering

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