KYC and AML

Continuous sanctions screening, transaction monitoring, and KYC verification on every account.

KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (Anti-Money Laundering) are the regulatory frameworks that determine who can open an account and what counts as normal vs suspicious activity. Glide’s approach: do the work properly so you’re not surprised, document it transparently so you understand what we check, and don’t add gold-plated friction beyond what regulation requires.

What we check on opening

For a personal account:

• Government-issued ID — passport, driver’s license, or national ID.
• Live selfie — matched biometrically against the ID photo.
• Country of residence — verified against the ID country and any address proof we ask for in higher-tier KYC.
• Sanctions screening — your name + DOB + country are checked against global sanctions lists (UN, OFAC, HMT, EU, MAS, HKMA).

For a business account, additionally:

• KYB on the entity — legal name, registration number, country of incorporation, regulatory status if applicable.
• Beneficial owner KYC — for any individual with >25% ownership.
• Business activity description — we use this to set transaction-monitoring baselines (a remittance company has different patterns than a SaaS).

Tiers of KYC

Tier	What’s checked	What unlocks
Crypto-only	None	Stablecoin deposits and withdrawals up to $10,000 lifetime
Standard	ID + selfie + sanctions	Fiat deposits, card issuance, full Glide feature set
Enhanced	Standard + address proof + activity baseline	Higher per-transaction and monthly limits
Enhanced + EDD	Enhanced + source-of-funds + relationship manager	Highest tier; for large-volume users or higher-risk activity

You move up tiers automatically when activity warrants, or on request. Most users sit at Standard indefinitely.

Continuous sanctions screening

Sanctions screening doesn’t stop after onboarding. We re-screen:

• Every counterparty on every outbound payment.
• Every on-chain destination address against the chain-analytics provider’s flagged-cluster lists.
• Every account holder periodically against updated sanctions lists.

If a screening hit triggers, the relevant transaction (or, in some cases, the account) pauses pending review. You’ll see a clear notice in the dashboard explaining what triggered and what’s needed to resolve. Most resolutions are same business day; we don’t hold accounts indefinitely without explanation.

Transaction monitoring

Beyond sanctions, we run transaction monitoring — pattern analysis that flags transactions that look unusual against:

• Your account’s baseline (declared activity, historical patterns).
• Industry-typical behavior for your business type.
• Known patterns of laundering, fraud, and account-takeover.

A flag is not a block. Most flags resolve into “this is fine, the model didn’t recognize it.” A small fraction escalate to manual review. An even smaller fraction become regulatory reports filed with the appropriate authority.

What we report

In some jurisdictions, we’re required to report:

• Threshold reports — transactions above local-law thresholds (e.g., $10,000 in cash-equivalent in some jurisdictions).
• Suspicious activity reports (SARs) — transactions that meet local-law suspicion criteria.

Filing a SAR doesn’t mean you’ve done something wrong. It means a pattern matched a regulator-defined trigger. We file as required by law and we don’t notify you (because the reports are confidential by design, in every jurisdiction).

What we don’t do

• Don’t share your transaction data with adtech, credit bureaus, or commercial counterparties.
• Don’t sell our anti-fraud signals as a service.
• Don’t freeze accounts capriciously. A freeze always has a documented reason and a documented resolution path. You get notified at freeze time with the reason in plain English.
• Don’t deny based on country of birth or nationality. We deny based on documented compliance criteria (sanctions, country of residence in OFAC-sanctioned territory). Your nationality alone isn’t a deny criteria.

How false positives are handled

Sanctions screening isn’t perfect. Common-name false positives (someone shares a name with a sanctioned individual) happen. When they do:

• The transaction holds while we verify identity disambiguation (typically same business day).
• We may ask for a copy of an ID to confirm you’re not the sanctioned individual.
• Once confirmed, the transaction releases and the false-positive flag is suppressed for future transactions on the same account.

We track our false-positive rate quarterly and share it in the regulatory snapshot.

Reporting fraud or unauthorized activity

If you see activity on your account you didn’t authorize, report it immediately:

• In-app — Security → Report fraud. This routes to a dedicated fraud queue.
• Email — [e-mail].
• Phone — for high-stakes situations, your relationship manager (business accounts) or our 24/7 fraud line (in-app).

Provisional account freeze and credit reversal are typically same-day for clear fraud.

Next

• Identity verification
• Two-factor authentication
• Data and privacy
• Regulatory