Ultimate Beneficial Owner

The ultimate beneficial owner is the natural person who in the end owns or controls a customer, or on whose behalf a transaction is really being carried out. The concept exists because the account holder and the person who benefits are not always the same, and anti-money-laundering rules are aimed at the second. For a company account it means tracing ownership through the corporate layers down to individuals, who are then identified in the same way a personal customer is; ownership thresholds and the treatment of trusts, foundations and nominee arrangements differ by jurisdiction, and where no owner can be identified the rules generally fall back to whoever exercises senior control. For a personal account the question takes a different form and is the one that matters most here: the platform is asking whether you are acting for yourself. Opening or lending an account so that another person can deposit, trade or withdraw through it makes you the customer of record for activity you do not control, which is the money-mule pattern that offers to rent a verified account rely on. It generally breaches the platform's terms, and the consequences can reach well beyond a closed account.