Decentralized KYC
Decentralized KYC agents on a substrate where users own their identity
A new model for identity verification. Zyphe's Decentralized KYC pairs AI verification agents with a substrate that shifts personal data from company databases into user-owned vaults, eliminating PII liability while enabling one-click reuse across platforms.
What is KYC software?
KYC software automates Know Your Customer checks: it collects customer data, verifies identity documents, screens against sanctions and PEP lists, and records every result for auditors. It replaces manual review queues, cutting onboarding from days to minutes while producing the evidence trail regulators expect.
The distinction that matters when you compare tools is between software that performs checks and software that defends decisions. Running a document check is the easy part. Being able to show a supervisor, two years later, exactly what was checked, what the system saw, who approved it and why, is what separates a verification API from a compliance platform.
Trusted by those who trust no one.
“Zyphe has completely transformed how we handle KYC data, allowing us to seamlessly share identity information with other financial participants while ensuring that users retain full control over their personal data.”
A typical verification completes in around 15 seconds, document check to decision.
Document matching accuracy, measured on live client verifications.
Improvement in onboarding completion, because verified users reuse a credential instead of starting again.
Verified once, reusable everywhere
With Decentralized KYC credentials, returning users skip the entire onboarding flow. One verified identity, reusable across every platform they trust, approved in a single click.
Identity confirmed · <1s
What KYC software has to do
Zyphe's Decentralized KYC delivers smart, fully automated AI-powered identity screening that adapts to emerging threats and regulatory requirements.
Identity document verification
Over 4,000 identity document versions from 213 countries and territories, plus Interpol and UN travel documents, across 15 document classes. The full list is published in our documentation, organised by region, country and where relevant by state. A published list is deliberate: a headline country count is a claim, a list you can check before you buy is an answer.
Liveness, anti-spoofing and injection-attack detection
Active liveness with anti-spoof checks against photographs, screens, videos and masks, and a face match against the document portrait at a configurable threshold, 75% by default. Injection-attack detection covers the attacks that never involve a camera at all: synthetic or replayed imagery fed directly into the capture stream, and deepfake presentation. Detection models are updated monthly, and this runs in-house rather than through a third-party biometric vendor, which means one fewer sub-processor in your data map.
Catching documents that aren't forged at all
The hardest category in identity fraud is the fraudulently obtained genuine document: a real ID, issued by the real authority, on false information. It defeats most vendors because there is nothing wrong with the document itself. Zyphe catches it at the document layer and downstream, across signals a genuine document cannot fake: biometric uniqueness, proof of address with name matching, geolocation and VPN mismatch, screening, and transaction monitoring after the account is open.
Sanctions, PEP, watchlist and adverse media screening
Screening covers sanctions, PEP, watchlists and adverse media, for individuals and companies, including UBOs identified during KYB. Fuzzy matching, a 0-100 risk score banded Low, Medium, High and Critical, and a count of contributing sources on every match so a reviewer can see why something fired. Screening runs at onboarding, then continues on list refreshes and event-driven triggers, with updates delivered by webhook.
Ongoing monitoring and an audit trail
A customer who was clear at onboarding may not be clear next week. Re-screening runs on a schedule you set and on list changes, and material changes reach your systems by webhook rather than waiting for a periodic review to notice. Every check, data source, match, override and approver is timestamped, so when a supervisor asks why you onboarded a specific customer in March, the answer is a report.
How it works
Zyphe delivers smart, AI-powered compliance screening that adapts to emerging threats and regulatory requirements.
Easily configure and plug in different identity modules and components based on your company's specific workflows using convenient webhooks and APIs.
Zyphe automatically sets data retention and monitoring requirements based on evolving regulatory needs around the world. Companies can further update monitoring timeframes based on their specific needs.
Customers and their counterparties are screened against global monitoring lists to ensure compliance with regulations around the world. Get notified instantly when someone appears on a monitoring list.
No more centralized PII honeypots
Decentralized KYC removes the single point of failure that fuels identity breaches. Personal data is sharded, encrypted, and user-controlled, so companies get compliance without custody.
Where data is stored, what is retained, and the audit status: the security and trust pageKYC software by industry
- Banks
- Customer Identification Program obligations at account opening, risk-rated due diligence, enhanced due diligence where risk demands it, and continuous monitoring across a large book.
- Fintechs and payments
- You compete on time-to-first-use, and compliance is the friction. The goal is not fewer checks, it is checks that run in the background and only interrupt the customer when something genuinely needs a human.
- Crypto and digital assets
- Travel Rule obligations, pseudonymous counterparties, and supervisors paying close attention to source of funds.
- Online gambling and casinos
- Document verification enforces a configurable minimum age, and the geolocation step checks GPS against IP country, flags VPN and proxy use, and screens against IP blacklists. NFC chip reading is supported for ePassports and eID cards.
How to choose a KYC vendor
An honest checklist, and our answers, including where we are weaker.
- Coverage
- Ask for the list, not the headline number. Ours is published: over 4,000 document versions across 213 countries and territories.
- Accuracy, stated properly
- Ask for false accept and false reject rates separately, on a population like yours. A single blended figure hides which way the errors fall, and rejecting genuine customers costs revenue while accepting fraudulent ones costs more. Ours is 99.8% document matching accuracy on live client verifications, and we will walk you through the breakdown rather than leaving you with one number.
- Manual review rate
- The number that determines your real cost and onboarding time, and the one vendors least like discussing.
- Auditability
- Ask to see a real audit export from a real case.
- Data handling
- Where does customer data live, for how long, under whose jurisdiction? Ours is unusual: documents and biometrics sit in the end user's vault rather than a central Zyphe database.
- Where we are weaker
- KYB register coverage depends on what each country's government makes accessible, and director data is frequently missing from official sources. We supplement it from additional providers, but coverage genuinely varies by jurisdiction. If your book is concentrated in markets with thin registers, ask us about those specific countries before you commit.
- Certifications
- SOC 2 and ISO/IEC 27001 audits are in progress, with completion targeted Q4 2026. Neither is certified today, and we would rather tell you that than let you find out during your own audit.
Why teams choose Zyphe
- No central PII store
- Documents and biometrics live in a user-held encrypted vault and are shared by proxy re-encryption. Zyphe cannot leak, or be compelled to hand over, a full identity record, because it does not have one.
- Agents that can act, behind a non-AI guard
- In Auto-pilot, an agent's decision is enacted only if a deterministic guard also passes. Every action is audited, and missing configuration fails closed.
- Ownership discovery with a cost preview
- Recursive UBO tracing to natural persons, with unresolved branches shown rather than quietly hidden, and reviewers extending branches node by node at a known price.
- Real-time transaction monitoring with provenance
- Every Allow, Review or Block shows exactly which rules fired, and any rule can be dry-run against your stored transactions before it goes live. Backtests are free.
- A process built to be audited, including by AI
- There is a built-in MCP server for agent access, and KYC Passport lets a verified user reuse their verification across partners with consent.
KYC vs KYB: verifying people vs verifying businesses
If your customers are companies, KYC alone is not enough. KYC verifies an individual. KYB verifies a company, its registration, status and ownership, and then requires KYC on the people who ultimately own or control it. Buying these as two disconnected tools is how firms end up with a UBO correctly identified in one system and never verified in another.
Zyphe runs the whole chain in one workflow: entity, then structure, then owners, then verified people, then one audit record. Each UBO and director gets a linked KYC flow with email invitations and scheduled reminders, and the KYB cannot be approved until they complete.
On price: pay per verification, in credits, with volume discounts. Every event consumes credits, and sandbox runs are billed like production unless the person being verified is internal to your own email domain. Model cost per successfully onboarded customer, not cost per check, because a cheaper headline rate with a higher retry and referral rate is usually the more expensive product.
KYB software →Better compliance in 190+ Countries
Banking Secrecy Act
Enforces strict record-keeping and reporting requirements for financial institutions to prevent money laundering and financial crimes in the United States.
Anti-money Laundering Act
Establishes measures and responsibilities for financial intermediaries in Switzerland to prevent money laundering and terrorist financing.
Proceeds of Crime
Canadian regulation requiring financial institutions to detect, prevent, and report suspicious transactions related to criminal proceeds.
Terrorist Financing Act
Legislation enforcing measures in Canada to detect, prevent, and report financial activities linked to terrorist financing.
Anti-money Laundering
Australian regulation mandating financial entities implement robust compliance measures to detect, prevent, and report money laundering activities.
Counter-Terrorism Financing Act
Australian law ensuring financial institutions identify, monitor, and report activities related to financing of terrorism to maintain national and global security.
Integrate in as little as 15 minutes
curl -X POST https://verify.zyphe.com/v1/login_sessions \
-H 'Authorization: Bearer <API_KEY>' \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-d '{"auth_type": "email"}'
Frequent Questions
Decentralized KYC is a privacy-first approach to identity verification where users own and control their personal data instead of companies storing it across multiple databases. Zyphe's Decentralized KYC model lets credentials be securely reused for one-click onboarding without repeatedly submitting documents.
Unlike traditional providers (Jumio, Onfido, Sumsub), Zyphe decentralizes identity storage, providing unmatched security, lower compliance overhead, and faster onboarding through reusable credentials and data ownership.
Zyphe offers robust Know Your Business (KYB) services, enabling quick and reliable verification of business legitimacy, ownership, and regulatory compliance.
Establishing trust involves secure identity verification, transparent user policies, and protecting user data. Zyphe enhances marketplace trust through decentralized identity management, eliminating single points of failure and improving user trust.
Complete KYC privacy settings ensure that user data is securely handled and compliant with privacy laws (e.g., GDPR, CCPA). Zyphe implements advanced cryptography and decentralized storage to ensure unparalleled privacy.
KYC Readiness Score
Score how mature your Know Your Customer programme is across verification, automation, fraud defence and audit-readiness.Explore more Zyphe products
KYC Passport
Onboard once, reuse everywhere
A verification the person carries with them, so a customer who has already been checked can be recognised by the next platform without uploading their documents again.
Learn more →Decentralized PII Storage
Nothing reconstructable left on your servers
Documents and biometrics are processed transiently and stored encrypted in the user's own vault. You keep the verification results, the audit logs and the proofs, in the EEA, the UK or the US.
Learn more →Know Your Customer
Verify people without keeping their documents
Document and liveness verification against 4,000+ identity document versions from 213 countries and territories, with injection detection and sanctions, PEP and adverse media screening.
Learn more →