why does the bank ask if I have foreign customers

Customers' countries are part of the risk profile

The bank asks this because it is obliged to make a risk assessment of every business customer, and the country where your customers or suppliers are located counts towards this. This follows from the customer due diligence requirements of the Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing Prevention Act: banks must know who their customers do business with, and countries with a higher risk of money laundering or sanctions evasion carry more weight. The bank is not interested in your turnover or your margins, but in the question of whether a country appears in your supply chains that is on a watch list.

In practice, you will be presented with a list of countries or regions, or an open question about the most important sales and purchasing countries. If you do not have that information readily available, a general answer based on your own records is usually sufficient — an exact list with all countries is usually not necessary, but the countries where the largest part of your turnover or purchases come from. This question often appears in the same section as the question at which banks the enterprise maintains accounts, and sometimes together with the question whether the enterprise or a director is on a sanctions list — these are two separate questions that do come from the same risk assessment.

Basis: client due diligence under the Wwft

The obligation to screen customers based on risk, including the country where business relationships are located, follows from the customer due diligence as laid down in the Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing Prevention Act. Banks pass that question on to their own business customers to complete their own file. This is separate from the requirements of the Trade Register Act 2007, which only sets out which basic data of your enterprise are registered, and separate from CSRD Directive 2022/2464, which concerns sustainability reporting and not customer due diligence.