Know-Your-Client (KYC) & suitability

Twenty seven questions. More than a fifth of the exam, and the element every other element leans on.

Here is the job in one sentence. You have to know a person well enough to give them advice, and then you have to prove you knew them. Everything in this element serves one of those two halves. The gathering of facts, the risk conversation, the account choice, the forms, the disclosure, the conflict you refused: all of it exists because a stranger trusted you with money and the regulator wants that trust to be earned in a way someone can check later.

The hardest part is not the forms. It is noticing that the person across the desk has told you two things that cannot both be true. A five year horizon and a plan that needs the money in eighteen months. A claim to handle a bad year, and a phone call after a mild one. That gap between what a client says and what a client's life can carry is where most of these marks live.