KYC cost per customer, fully loaded.
What an onboarded customer actually costs your firm in 2026. Vendor checks, sanctions screening, ongoing monitoring, and the operations labour everyone forgets to include.
Aligned to the FATF Recommendations (with the February 2025 amendment) and the UK Money Laundering Regulations 2017. Cost ranges are practitioner-sourced from public vendor pricing, the LSEG / Forrester True Cost of AML Compliance benchmark, and PwC perpetual KYC labour-saving figures. Full sourcing on the methodology page.
The unit that matters is per-customer, not per-check.
Vendor invoices show a per-check or per-verification line. That figure understates the total cost of getting a customer onboarded by 60-120%. The defensible operational unit is the fully-loaded per-customer figure: vendor checks plus sanctions / PEP / adverse media screening cycles, plus the operations labour to investigate the alerts those cycles generate, plus an EDD overlay weighted by the high-risk population, plus the year-one share of ongoing monitoring on the active book. CFOs and Heads of Compliance defend per-customer cost in board packs because customer-acquisition cost and lifetime value are computed on the same denominator.
The five components below are the canonical decomposition. Each links through to the deep-dive page where the assumption set, the source list and the worked examples sit.
Document type, liveness model, vendor pricing tier.
Reusable / network IDs at the lower end; multi-document EDD at the upper.
Data provider scope, list breadth, cycle frequency.
World-Check / Dow Jones / ComplyAdvantage commercials vary materially with volume.
Source-of-funds, UBO mapping, senior approval workflow.
On top of CDD baseline. The 3-8x multiplier nobody publishes.
Refresh cadence, transaction monitoring, perpetual KYC scope.
PwC pKYC benchmark: 60-80% labour saving vs traditional periodic review.
Hit rate, false-positive rate, analyst fully-loaded cost.
The line vendor pricing pages never quote because vendors do not bear it.
Three personas, fully-loaded.
The same fintech onboards all three. The cost differential between a low-risk retail customer and a high-risk EDD customer can be 30-40x at the unit level. Risk mix is consequently the dominant cost variable on a fintech compliance budget, ahead of vendor selection.
| Persona | Vendor checks | Screening | Ops labour | Y1 monitoring | Fully loaded |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Low-risk retail customer Resident, government ID, no PEP / sanctions hit | £0.85-£2.40 | £0.05-£0.55 | £0.50-£2.20 | £8-£18 | £4-£18 |
EMI corporate customer UBO mapping, two directors, single jurisdiction | £6.00-£22.00 | £1.20-£5.40 | £14.00-£38.00 | £18-£35 | £24-£78 |
High-risk EDD customer Cross-border UBO chain, source-of-funds review, PEP-adjacent | £8.00-£28.00 | £2.00-£8.50 | £28.00-£95.00 | £35-£60 | £45-£180 |
Persona figures are practitioner-sourced from public ComplyCube / Sumsub vendor rates, LSEG / Forrester True Cost of AML Compliance, and engagement histories. Year-1 monitoring is the share of annual recurring cost attributable to the onboarding cohort in the customer's first year.
Sanity-check your scenario.
Three inputs, a defensible per-customer figure and an annual onboarding-cost line. The full calculator on the calculator page adds business-model presets, a build / buy / hybrid switch, and the annual ongoing line. Math is transparent on the methodology page. No email gate to release the result.
Two regulatory anchors that move the budget.
FATF February 2025 amendment on proportionality
The February 2025 update to the FATF Recommendations replaced the word "commensurate" with "proportionate" throughout the risk-based-approach guidance, with further June 2025 commentary explicitly encouraging simplified due diligence in lower-risk scenarios. For UK and EU fintechs that have over-indexed on uniform CDD across a low-risk consumer book, the amendment is a defensible cost-saving lever. The risk-assessment work that supports a tiered approach is itself a cost line, but a rigorous risk assessment pays back several times its build cost in reduced screening cycles and ops labour. See fatf-gafi.org for the published Recommendations.
UK MLR 2017 and FCA Handbook SYSC 6.3
The Money Laundering Regulations 2017 (SI 2017/692) are the binding statutory instrument; FCA Handbook SYSC 6.3 sets the financial-crime systems-and-controls expectations. JMLSG Guidance gives the sectoral interpretation that a UK MLRO is expected to follow. The cost implications are concrete: Regulation 33 enumerates EDD triggers (PEPs, high-risk third-country relationships, complex / unusual transactions); each trigger maps to a discrete operational cost on the page. See the geography page for a UK / EU / US comparison and the CDD vs EDD page for how triggers cost out.
What budgets miss.
Five lines that turn up after the budget paper is signed. None of them are in the vendor quote, all of them are in the actual operating cost.
Vendor invoice is roughly 35-55% of fully-loaded per-customer cost. The remainder is people.
Annual recurring KYC is rarely sized in the original budget. Add £8-£45 per active customer per year.
Moving from a 5% EDD book to 25% EDD book lifts blended fully-loaded cost 2-4x.
Adverse media generates the bulk of onboarding alerts. Each one costs analyst time.
Your KYC platform is a SaaS provider. Their SOC 2 review enters your file as an annual cost.
Common questions about KYC cost
How much does KYC cost per customer in 2026?+
Why do vendor blogs quote a much lower number?+
Is sanctions screening included in standard KYC vendor pricing?+
What does FATF require and how does it affect cost?+
Does perpetual KYC actually save money?+
How should a fintech sanity-check a vendor quote?+
Sources cited on this page
- FATF Recommendations (Feb 2025 update; June 2025 RBA guidance)
- Money Laundering Regulations 2017 (SI 2017/692)
- FCA Handbook SYSC 6.3 financial crime systems and controls
- JMLSG Guidance, current edition
- ComplyCube published per-check pricing · $0.10-$1.50 ID document, $0.25-$2.00 biometric
- Sumsub published platform pricing · $1.35 reusable verification, plans from $149/mo
- LSEG / Forrester True Cost of AML Compliance, most recent edition · $72.9M average enterprise figure cited via FNZ and Fenergo
- PwC Perpetual KYC: A new approach to periodic reviews · 60-80% labour saving on periodic-review process