Netherlands / Regulation

Wwft onboarding requirements and phone validation

The Wwft (Wet ter voorkoming van witwassen en financieren van terrorisme) is the Dutch law requiring risk-based customer due diligence to prevent money laundering and terrorist financing, supervised for banks and many other financial institutions by De Nederlandsche Bank. It does not name phone number checks specifically. A carrier and number type check is a proportionate control that supports the onboarding and ongoing monitoring expectations the Wwft sets out. This is general information, not legal advice.

What the Wwft requires

The Wwft has been in force since 2008 and has been amended several times since. It takes a risk-based approach: an institution assesses the money laundering and terrorist financing risk a client presents and puts in place mitigating measures proportionate to that risk, rather than applying one fixed checklist to every customer. De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) supervises Wwft compliance for banks and a wide range of other financial institutions; other supervisors, including the AFM, cover additional sectors.

Customer due diligence under the Wwft has four core components: identifying the client, identifying the ultimate beneficial owner, establishing the purpose and intended nature of the business relationship, and ongoing monitoring of the relationship and the transactions carried out within it. Institutions in scope must also report unusual transactions to FIU-Nederland, the Dutch financial intelligence unit.

Where phone validation supports Wwft controls

Telebase does not implement or certify Wwft compliance. What a carrier and number type check does is support two of the four components above with evidence a Dutch firm can point to.

• Onboarding due diligence: a carrier lookup and phone validation check flags non-fixed VoIP numbers, inactive lines and country mismatches (a Dutch-format number served by a foreign carrier) at the point a new business relationship is established, which is a control a risk-based approach expects a firm to have in place.
• Ongoing monitoring: re-checking a customer's number over the life of the relationship, and, once live, checking SIM swap recency before a high-risk action, supports the ongoing monitoring obligation rather than treating due diligence as a one-off event at sign-up. SIM swap detection is launching for the Netherlands and currently returns UNKNOWN; see the SIM swap API reference.

This page describes the Wwft in general terms to explain where a telecom signal fits into an onboarding and monitoring control set. It is not legal advice and does not confirm compliance with any specific Wwft obligation. Consult qualified Dutch legal counsel or your compliance function for advice on your own obligations.

Dutch market context

For the full Dutch market page covering carrier landscape and number formatting, see phone number lookup API for the Netherlands.