bank wants to know what the risks are in my sector

Sector risk is a question about money laundering, not about creditworthiness

The bank asks this as part of the customer due diligence required under the Act on the Prevention of Money Laundering and Terrorism Financing (Wwft), not because it doubts your creditworthiness. It must classify your business according to the risk of money laundering or terrorism financing, and the sector in which you operate is one of the indicators for this. Cash-intensive branches, trade with high-risk countries, or sectors that appear more frequently in fraud cases score higher. This says nothing about your company specifically — it is a classification based on the sector as a whole.

Specifically, you answer with a description of your core activity as it is also recorded at the Chamber of Commerce: what you sell, to whom, and through which channels. Align this with the SBI code that belongs to your registration in the business register — for the bank, this is the first check to see whether your answer matches what is officially registered about you. If your actual activity differs from the registered code, that is often already a question that the bank asks; ensure that the two are aligned before you fill in the rest. Questions about the source of the company's assets and about at which banks the enterprise maintains accounts often appear in the same section and follow the same logic: the bank wants to be able to explain the money flows in your sector.

Basis: customer due diligence under the AMLTFA

This obligation follows from the customer due diligence that banks must perform under the Act on the Prevention of Money Laundering and Terrorism Financing. The sector in which an undertaking is active is a fixed indicator for the risk assessment that the bank must make. The link with the SBI code follows from the Trade Register Act 2007, which sets out which business data of each undertaking are registered and can therefore be checked by the bank.