Know Your Business (KYB) is the process of confirming that a company is legally registered, genuinely exists, and is controlled by people who are who they claim to be.
According to AiPrise, where Know Your Customer (KYC) establishes that an individual is real, KYB establishes that a business is real, and identifies who sits behind it.
Banks, FinTechs, marketplaces and payment platforms all run KYB checks on the merchants, vendors and corporate customers they onboard, with the aim of keeping shell companies, sanctioned entities and fraudulent operators out of their systems while satisfying regulators that due diligence has been done.
The two disciplines overlap by design. Every thorough KYB check also verifies the individuals behind a business, since a legitimate company controlled by a sanctioned person remains a serious risk.
For regulated financial institutions, KYB is a legal requirement, with obligations set out under the US Bank Secrecy Act and FinCEN’s Customer Due Diligence Rule, the EU’s AMLD6 and incoming AML Regulation, the UK’s Money Laundering Regulations 2017, and the FATF’s global recommendations on beneficial ownership. A significant shift landed in August 2026, when FinCEN issued a final rule permanently exempting US companies from reporting beneficial ownership information under the Corporate Transparency Act, leaving only foreign companies registered to do business in the US within scope. Crucially, this removed the government database compliance teams could lean on, but did not loosen banks’ and FinTechs’ underlying duty to identify and verify beneficial owners. The practical result is that KYB has become more important in the US this year, not less.
A complete KYB check verifies five things: legal existence via registry data, core business identity details, ownership and control through Ultimate Beneficial Owner (UBO) tracing, sanctions and adverse media screening, and broader risk context such as digital footprint. Increasingly, providers are structuring this into a five-stage lifecycle spanning collection, verification, risk scoring, review and decisioning, and ongoing monitoring, rather than a one-off check at onboarding.
The hardest parts of KYB remain registry fragmentation across jurisdictions, tracing UBOs through layered ownership structures, verifying small businesses with thin data footprints, and countering generative AI-enabled fraud capable of manufacturing entire fake businesses. This last threat is pushing the industry towards primary-source verification and cross-signal analysis rather than checking documents in isolation.
Automation is reshaping delivery speed and consistency: platforms such as AiPrise report straightforward KYB checks completing in three to five minutes, with up to 80% of verification workflows automated and analysts focused on exception cases rather than routine data gathering.
Read the full AiPrise post here.
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