A KYB check — Know Your Business verification — is the business equivalent of KYC. Before you onboard a company as a customer, supplier, partner or borrower, a KYB check confirms that the company legally exists, is in good standing, and tells you who actually owns and controls it. For regulated entities it is a legal obligation; for everyone else it is the difference between knowing your counterparty and hoping.
KYB has moved from a niche banking process to a mainstream requirement. Marketplaces, payment providers, lenders, insurers and B2B platforms all need to verify businesses at scale — and manual registry lookups do not scale.
What a KYB check contains
- Registry verification — confirmation of legal name, registration number, incorporation date, registered address and current status against the official company registry.
- Filing and status history — whether accounts and annual returns are filed, and any strikes, dissolutions or re-registrations.
- Directors and officers — current and former directors, secretaries and legal representatives.
- Ownership and UBO resolution — the shareholder tree followed up to the ultimate beneficial owners above the applicable threshold.
- Screening — the entity and its principals checked against sanctions lists, PEP databases and adverse media.
- Risk context — insolvency, court judgments, charges and credit indicators where available.
When a KYB check is required
For obliged entities under AML legislation — banks, EMIs, payment institutions, CIFs, CASPs, accountants, lawyers and real-estate professionals among them — KYB is a statutory part of customer due diligence whenever the customer is a legal person. EU AML directives require identifying the customer and its beneficial owners and verifying that identity from reliable sources.
Outside the regulated perimeter, KYB is standard practice in trade credit, supplier onboarding, marketplace seller verification and partnership due diligence. The cost of skipping it shows up as fraud losses, sanctioned-counterparty exposure and credit write-offs.
KYB vs KYC
In practice a complete business onboarding runs both: KYB on the company, then KYC on the UBOs and authorised signatories the KYB process identifies.
| KYC | KYB | |
|---|---|---|
| Subject | Individual person | Legal entity and the people behind it |
| Primary sources | ID documents, biometrics, proof of address | Company registries, filings, UBO registers |
| Key output | Verified identity | Verified entity, ownership tree and control |
| Screening | Sanctions / PEP / adverse media on the person | On the entity and all principals |
| Typical trigger | Consumer onboarding | B2B onboarding, credit, partnership |
What good KYB looks like
Good KYB is primary-source first: data pulled from the official registry rather than re-keyed or scraped from aggregators of unknown freshness. It resolves ownership through intermediate entities and across borders, not just the first layer of shareholders. It screens everyone it finds, not just the contracting entity. And it produces evidence — the registry extract, the ownership tree, the screening results and the reviewer's decision — in a form an auditor can pick up without explanation.
For cross-border counterparties, the hard part is registry coverage and language. A KYB provider is only as good as its sources in the jurisdiction where your counterparty is incorporated.
How Infocredit Group approaches it
KYB is our home ground. Infocredit Group has provided company credit and verification data in Cyprus and the region for decades, and our KYB reports combine registry data, ownership and UBO structures, insolvency and court records, and screening into a single verified report. ComplianceSuite automates the full KYB workflow for regulated onboarding; API4ALL delivers KYB reports by API for teams building verification into their own systems.
Frequently asked questions
What does KYB stand for?
Know Your Business. It is the process of verifying that a company exists, is properly registered, and identifying the people who own and control it — the business counterpart of KYC (Know Your Customer) for individuals.
What is included in a KYB check?
Registry verification of the legal entity, filing and status history, directors and officers, shareholder and UBO resolution, sanctions/PEP/adverse media screening of the entity and its principals, and — where available — insolvency, court and credit information.
Who needs to perform KYB checks?
All obliged entities under AML rules when dealing with corporate customers: banks, payment and e-money institutions, investment firms, crypto providers, accountants, lawyers and real-estate professionals. It is also standard practice for lenders, insurers, marketplaces and any business extending trade credit.
What is the difference between KYB and UBO verification?
UBO verification is one component of KYB. KYB covers the entity itself — registration, status, directors, screening — while UBO verification specifically traces ownership to the natural persons who ultimately own or control the company.
How long does a KYB check take?
With registry-connected data sources, a standard KYB report is near-instant. Complex cross-border ownership structures or jurisdictions with manual registries can take longer, which is why source coverage matters when choosing a provider.
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