# Know Your Customer
Know your customer or (KYC) is a regulatory requirement where a provider of a financial services provider or [bank](bank.md) must collect personally identifiable information about its customers in order to mitigate fraud or assist with law enforcement activity. 

Some crypto exchanges require KYC when onboarding customers to trade [cryptoasset](cryptoasset.md). Unregulated exchanges allow customers to trade without going through this process.

KYC is used to assign an identity to a crypto [wallet](wallet.md) account and is used by law enforcement to track the provenance of crypto assets associated with [illicit-financing](illicit-financing.md).

See also [money-laundering](money-laundering.md), [aml](aml.md), [illicit-financing](illicit-financing.md) and [regulatory-arbitrage](regulatory-arbitrage.md).