Know Your Customer, KYC, is the identity verification a regulated broker must complete before it can hold your money. It is required by anti-money-laundering law, it applies at every FCA-authorised broker, and it is the reason a new account takes a day or two rather than a minute.
What is asked
Proof of identity: a passport, driving licence or national identity card, usually photographed or uploaded. Proof of address: a utility bill, bank statement or council tax letter dated within the last three months, showing the same name and address as the application. Sometimes proof of source of funds, a payslip or bank statement, for larger deposits. And a questionnaire about trading experience and finances, which the broker uses to assess whether CFDs are appropriate for you and which it is obliged by the FCA to ask.
The account must be in your own name, funded from an account in your own name, and withdrawals go back to the same source. A broker that does not ask for any of this is either unregulated or not a broker.
Why it matters for an EA owner
A funded account with an EA attached cannot be run until verification clears, and a withdrawal can be held if the documents on file are out of date. Prop firms run the same checks before a funded account is issued. And an EA running on an account that is not in the owner's name, a relative's or a friend's, is an account the owner cannot control or withdraw from, and usually a breach of the broker's terms.
A trader opens an account on a Monday, uploads a passport and a bank statement from two months earlier, and completes the questionnaire. The broker approves the account on Tuesday. A second trader uploads a photo of a driving licence with the address obscured and a phone bill from last year. Three rounds of requests later the account is approved the following week, by which time the EA's forward test start date has passed.
Have the documents ready before opening the account: identity, a dated proof of address, and, if the deposit is large, a source-of-funds document. Use your own name and your own bank account throughout. Keep the proof of address current, since a withdrawal is the moment the broker checks again. None of this is about the EA. All of it decides whether the EA can start on the day you planned.