what kind of questions do you get from the bank when applying for a business credit line

UBO, source of funds and sanctions check keep recurring

A credit application to a bank consists roughly of three blocks of questions: who is the company, who is behind it, and can it repay. The first block is largely factual and comes directly from the Business Register: legal form, registered address, directors and the date of registration. The second block is the customer due diligence that the bank is required to conduct under the Anti-Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing Directive: who are the ultimate beneficial owners of the company, or whether any of them is a politically exposed person, whether the company appears on a sanctions list, and what the source of the funds is. This block is often identical to what an insurer asks, only worded differently — the background to this is described at why the bank asks different questions than the insurer.

The third block concerns creditworthiness: filed annual accounts, a current credit rating, at which other banks the company maintains accounts and the average payment term to suppliers. If one of those documents is missing — for example because the latest annual accounts have not yet been filed — then the standard answer is to report this in the question itself, with a reason and an expected date, instead of leaving the field blank or guessing. In larger applications, a question about sustainability risks is nowadays also appearing; this is the only part that does not come from the company's own administration but from the reporting obligation that banks themselves have.

The legal basis lies in three separate regulations

The identity data follow from the registration requirement of the Dutch Business Register Act 2007, the customer due diligence follows from the Anti-Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing Directive, and the sustainability questions that banks as large enterprises must themselves answer have their origin in Directive (EU) 2022/2464. The fact that the UBO question specifically often appears literally in the credit questionnaire, and how it relates to what is asked in a KYB questionnaire, is explained at where the answer to the UBO question is in the file.