Updating ID at Banks; many of you may have heard about this issue, or received a letter asking you to provide a digital copy of your identification to your Bank as soon as possible.
Why are you getting this, or hearing this, firstly? Well, it is really old news, it refers to the La Act 10/2010 on the Prevention of Money Laundering and Financing of Terrorism. This ordered that the Bank s are obliged to keep a digital copy of the client´s ID documents on file, so that their identity has been verified. What is a digital copy of your identification documents? Basically it is a scanned copy of your latest passport.
Of course, this is such a massive undertaking and so many people have not complied, and ignored, or not seen, the request, that now the Banks are, in some cases, threatening to cancel the accounts or clients until the documentation has been provided.
Banco Popular has given a date of 15th December 2014 for the information to be sent or scanned and emailed to them. Sabadell also have had a deadline. We spoke to the Bank Manager next door, and he said really we have had no choice but to stop people´s accounts in order to make them contact us as they ignore us. However, annoying it is, you can see his point that many people do ignore or not understand communications from their Bank in Spain. Our advice is to check with your Bank when you are able to, if you need to provide anything and do it as soon as you are able to, but not to worry unduly about this. Really the banks just want contact to know when it will be provided, and stopping an account is a way of forcing that contact. Then it will be immediately reactivated. They do try not to “bounce” anything, more to just stop a cash withdrawal. So please don´t ignore it if anything strange happens with your bank account.
Why are you getting this, or hearing this, firstly? Well, it is really old news, it refers to the La Act 10/2010 on the Prevention of Money Laundering and Financing of Terrorism. This ordered that the Bank s are obliged to keep a digital copy of the client´s ID documents on file, so that their identity has been verified. What is a digital copy of your identification documents? Basically it is a scanned copy of your latest passport.
Of course, this is such a massive undertaking and so many people have not complied, and ignored, or not seen, the request, that now the Banks are, in some cases, threatening to cancel the accounts or clients until the documentation has been provided.
Banco Popular has given a date of 15th December 2014 for the information to be sent or scanned and emailed to them. Sabadell also have had a deadline. We spoke to the Bank Manager next door, and he said really we have had no choice but to stop people´s accounts in order to make them contact us as they ignore us. However, annoying it is, you can see his point that many people do ignore or not understand communications from their Bank in Spain. Our advice is to check with your Bank when you are able to, if you need to provide anything and do it as soon as you are able to, but not to worry unduly about this. Really the banks just want contact to know when it will be provided, and stopping an account is a way of forcing that contact. Then it will be immediately reactivated. They do try not to “bounce” anything, more to just stop a cash withdrawal. So please don´t ignore it if anything strange happens with your bank account.
