Central Bank of the UAE Guidance for Licensed Financial Institutions on Customer Due Diligence/Know Your Customer and Record-Keeping

October, 2025

Contents

Annex 1. CDD/KYC Red Flags...38 Annexure 2: Synopsis of the Best Practice...39

1. Introduction

Conducting customer due diligence (“CDD”) and implementing know your customer (“KYC”) and record-keeping controls are foundational parts of compliance with anti-money laundering, combating the financing of terrorism, and counter proliferation financing (“AML/CFT/CPF”), sanctions, counter-fraud, and anti-bribery and corruption laws. Specifically, adequate CDD/KYC is the cornerstone for licensed financial institutions (“LFI”) when establishing an understanding of customers, including a customer’s occupation / profession, business practices, source of income or source of wealth (“SoW”), source of funds (“SoF”), and expected activity for which to detect suspicious activity in the future. According to both the United Arab Emirates (“UAE”)’s laws and regulations in addition to financial crimes compliance (“FCC”) global standards, all LFIs should have a written CDD/KYC pr...