[sfriedr]

How can you skip (at least parts of) KYC requirements these days?

To me it seems KYC gets ever more pervasive: I had opened a bank account 5 years ago in the EU/UK space and 4 years ago closed it again. Now I opened an account again at the same bank - and the process was significantly more involved, more documentations needed to be provided for the same service, even though I had been their customer before.

The KYC requirement makes me feel uneasy from a privacy point of view: If it would be an eyes-only verification, I would be happy to provide a lot of data to prove I'm not a bad guy. But since the data gets stored and potentially forwarded to third parties, this significantly increases my risk for data and identity theft, as number of increasing data breaches show: https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/96667-the-top-data...

And there is also a long-term risk associated with excessive KYC data hoarding about individuals: The atrocities in Nazi Germany were in part possible because the government gathered data about the Jewish population (e.g. by enacting essentially KYC-like requirements for its citizens; though I guess through this lense the word should be "KYJ") and then subsequently used that data to round them up: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/locating-t...

Also, what do you mean by "not out of bounds for tens of percent of the retail portfolio of many banks"