The news: The Trump administration is reportedly considering whether to require banks to collect citizenship information from new customers and possibly existing ones.

The administration has not publicly proposed or announced such a requirement, and a spokesperson called the published reports “baseless speculation.”

Zoom out: Requiring banks to collect citizenship status would expand Know Your Customer (KYC) checks. Currently, banks must collect a person’s name, date of birth, address, and an ID number, and applicants can use passports as identity documents. (Banks are allowed to open accounts for noncitizens using applicable identity documents.) Banks then screen applicants for fraud and financial crime risks.

Access to banking has long been a problem for immigrants that fintechs have spent years trying to ease. Normal KYC processes apply risk scores that prevent consumers without a limited or atypical financial history from opening accounts. If banks were also mandated to collect citizenship info to open a US bank account, it could further limit financial access for noncitizens living and working in the US, likely making it difficult for them to stay in the country.

Implications for banks: Even if a citizenship-data requirement were not designed to block applicants, it would extend banks’ compliance obligations beyond their traditional focus on financial crime under the Bank Secrecy Act, which is enforced by the Treasury’s Department’s financial crimes enforcement network (or FinCEN) financial crime.

Even as a rumor, the idea may be concrete enough that banks should be asking their vendors what a new reporting requirement would involve and what it would cost.