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KYC Compliance Frameworks in Sub-Saharan African Private Banking: An Integrative Review of Regulatory Gaps, Institutional Capacity, and Client Onboarding Risk

Priscilla Amerley Nortey, Osemudiamhen Ebhojie

Abstract

Know-your-customer requirements sit at the centre of a tension that Sub-Saharan African banking has not resolved: the same customer due diligence rules that are meant to protect the financial system from criminal abuse also raise the cost of serving exactly the low-income, undocumented, and rural customers that the region most needs to bring into the formal sector. This paper reviews the scholarly and policy literature on known-your-customer and customer due diligence in Sub- Saharan African private banking, organising the evidence around three questions: where the regulatory frameworks fall short of, or diverge from, international standards; whether banks and their supervisors have the institutional capacity to implement what the rules require; and how onboarding controls shape the risk that customers are either wrongly admitted or wrongly excluded. The review draws on standard-setting documents, development-finance research, the economics of money-laundering enforcement, and country and regional studies, and reads them through a financial integrity versus financial inclusion lens supported by risk-based regulation theory, responsive regulation, and the organizational theory of decoupling. Four patterns recur. First, formal adoption of international standards has outpaced the supervisory and identity infrastructure needed to apply them, producing a decoupling of formal rules from operative practice. Second, where the risk-based approach has been adopted in name, weak guidance and defensive bank behaviour have often turned it into a blunt de-risking instrument rather than a tool for proportionate control, with measurable harm to correspondent-banking access. Third, the politically exposed and cross-border clientele characteristic of private banking concentrates integrity risk at precisely the point where verification is hardest. Fourth, the spread of mobile money, tiered accounts, and digital identity shows that proportionate onboarding is achievable, though the gains remain fragile and unevenly distributed. The review concludes that the region's central problem is less the absence of rules than a structural mismatch between rule ambition and implementation capacity, and it identifies where better evidence is most needed.

Keywords

customer due diligence; financial integrity; financial inclusion; de-risking; risk-based regulation; supervisory capacity; politically exposed persons; tiered accounts

References

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