As a European Union member, Spain has strict regulations around Know Your Customer (KYC), Anti-Money Laundering (AML), privacy, identity verification and digital services.

Sophisticated partners with expertise in the market and state-of-the-art technology can help organizations accelerate customer verification while ensuring compliance and strong match rate performance.

Examples of KYC and AML Compliance in Spain

The Spanish Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing Prevention Act covers AML and KYC requirements. The act requires that obliged entities implement customer due diligence procedures, including identity verification, to prevent money laundering and terrorist financing.

Sepblac, Spain’s financial intelligence unit, requires that regulated entities identify and verify, through reliable documents, the identities of people establishing business relationships or transactions that are equal to or greater than 1,000 euros, according to the unofficially translated guidance.

Reliable documents include a national identity card. Sepblac also has approved remote procedures for identity verification.

A Snapshot of Identity Verification in Spain

The Spanish government issues a national ID, also called a Documento Nacional de Identidad, to all Spanish citizens. 

Optimal verification in Spain often relies on organizations collecting first and second names as well as national ID numbers.

Identity document verification is acceptable in Spain. Those documents include driver’s licenses, passports, national IDs and residence permits.

The Spanish government also has implemented the Cl@ve digital ID solution, which allows users to authenticate themselves and access government services. Cl@ve aligns with EU eIDAS requirements

Business Verification Insights in Spain

In Spain, companies must register with the corporate registry and Spanish tax office.

Spain’s tax authorities issue a nine-digit VAT number to identify registered companies. It includes information such as nationality, province and provincial registration.

Many companies in Spain also must annually provide ultimate beneficial owner (UBO) information to an official register. UBOs are defined as people who directly or indirectly own or control more than 25% of a company’s shares or voting rights or who control the entity through other means.

Optimal business verification in Spain often requires VAT numbers and registered company names. Identity verification can provide a more efficient path for verifying sole proprietorships.

Trulioo in Spain

Organizations face a complex regulatory and verification landscape for people and businesses in Spain. Trulioo can help organizations accelerate the process because it connects to multiple data sources in Spain and has local expertise and state-of-the-art capabilities to optimize verification performance.

When organizations blend that data source coverage with services such as watchlist screening and adverse media checks, they create a holistic onboarding strategy that can lead to industry-leading verification rates.

The challenges multiply when organizations verify businesses in the country. But when they access a vast data source network, market expertise and cutting-edge technology, they can accelerate due diligence – from verifying sole proprietorships to unraveling complex UBO structures – on any company operating in the region.

A full suite of in-house verification capabilities, paired with the precision of data science, can give organizations the insight and flexibility they need to overcome any onboarding challenge in Spain.

Person Match Buyer's Guide

Buyer’s Guide

Identity Verified: Your Roadmap to Match Rate Excellence

Learn strategies for selecting a verification partner that can help match rates soar with routing precision and fresh data.

On-demand Webinars

Finovate: Why Your KYB Is Only As Good As Your KYC

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In 2022, global fines for failing to prevent money laundering (AML) and other financial crime surged more than 50 percent, totalling over $2B in the banking sector alone. With the ever-increasing complexity of AML regulations and global nature of financial services, financial institutions are investing more resources into compliance and due diligence to protect their businesses.

Join us for an engaging conversation about the complexity of Know Your Business (KYB) and Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations and how a single, integrated Identity platform can help streamline the process of truly knowing the entity and the people you are doing business with.

In this webinar, you will learn:

  • The latest trends in KYB and KYC and how to protect your business
  • How artificial intelligence can help streamline tedious, manual verification processes
  • New strategies for verifying people and businesses with an integrated identity platform

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s recent approval of 11 spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) holds the potential to drive more people to the crypto market. 

“The decision ‘marks a significant step towards the institutionalization of cryptocurrency, expanding bitcoin’s accessibility to a wider audience in a more regulated and simpler manner,’” according to a Jan. 10 Forbes report citing emailed comments from Yiannis Giokas, senior director at Moody’s Analytics. 

Digital tokens could get a further boost with the expected April 2024 bitcoin halving. A halving reduces the number of new bitcoins and has been associated with bitcoin price increases. Bitcoin prices went up 28.26% in the month before the May 2020 halving and rose another 461.2% by May the following year.

If recent events produce a resurgence in crypto investing among the general population, exchanges with fast, compliant customer onboarding can take a strong position in the market. 

Robust KYC Compliance

Whether the market is up or down, regulatory scrutiny is a constant in the crypto industry.

Robust Know Your Customer (KYC) processes at onboarding can help crypto exchanges verify identities and perform due diligence to understand customers’ financial activities and risks. Those steps are legally required and, when executed through a global platform with worldwide data coverage, can be fast and secure.

Each country has different requirements around KYC compliance. But common elements of KYC include obtaining and verifying information such as legal name, birthdate, address and national ID number.

The shifting requirements across borders can strain onboarding and compliance teams, especially when crypto exchanges encounter new regulations or changes in risk scenarios. Verification processes that quickly adapt to new conditions can play a critical role in ensuring efficient operations and confident expansion.

Crypto exchanges that achieve peak performance while maintaining compliance can modify onboarding procedures based on country, customer information and risk-based approach. That onboarding agility can help exchanges accelerate verification, reduce abandonment and improve conversion rates.

Optimized Crypto Onboarding Across the Globe

Organizations face a broad range of onboarding challenges – from compliance obligations to customer expectations – and Trulioo delivers a balanced, agile response. That’s one reason why the world’s three top crypto exchanges trust Trulioo for their identity verification needs.

For instance, one crypto exchange turned to Trulioo for accurate, streamlined identity verification and onboarding value optimization around the world. With millions of customers worldwide and billions traded every quarter, the stakes were high for the exchange to ensure customer trust across the globe. But the organization also wanted to identify areas in its onboarding that could be adjusted to improve performance and optimize costs.

Trulioo provided clarity with its value optimization program, which is a data-led audit that ensures an organization’s configuration of sources and input quality in each market delivers the best possible performance.

That program helped the exchange identify average performance increases greater than 5% in key markets and onboard a predicted 180,000 new users annually.

Whatever the future holds for the crypto industry, Trulioo is there to deliver the flexibility for exchanges to strike the right balance of security, growth and onboarding speed.

Crypto Exchange Targets 180,000 Additional Users Annually

Case Study

Crypto Exchange Targets 180,000 Additional Users Annually

Learn how a crypto exchange turned to Trulioo for accurate, streamlined identity verification and onboarding value optimization around the world.