The Government of India has amended the Prevention of Money Laundering (Maintenance of Records) Rules, 2005; vide a notification dated July 7, 2015 for setting up of the Central KYC Records Registry (CKYCR). In the notification, it is proposed that CKYCR would receive, store, safeguard and retrieve the KYC records in digital form of a client, for which necessary amendments to the Rules have been made. The KYC records received and stored by the CKYCR could be retrieved online by any reporting entity across the financial sector for the purpose of establishing an account based relationship. In order to collect and reporting the KYC data, CKYCR made uniform KYC templates for various institutions across financial markets like banks, mutual funds, NBFCs etc. Separate templates are made for individuals and legal entities. In case of small accounts only section 1 of the template which contains personal details of proposed customer together with the photograph, signature/thumb impression and self-certification document is obtained. A unique KYC Identifier will be generated for each client by the registry and same will be received by the reporting entity. This will avoid duplication of reporting to Registry about the same party. The templates also fulfill the reporting requirement under Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) and Common Reporting Standards (CRS).The records held with the Central Registry consist with sufficient backups and also they are tamper proof, which ensures that the data available with the Registry cannot be lost or destroyed or easily accessed by unauthorized persons.
Any financial institutions which are a reporting entity to the Central KYC Registry can access to the common data about the clients stored in the central registry. This would decrease the difficulties of producing and verifying KYC documents every time when the customer approaches a new financial entity for a financial product.
The CKYC programme is managed by CERSAI (Central Registry of Securitization and Asset Reconstruction and Security Interest in India).
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