KYB Software
KYB software that verifies a business and everyone behind it, in one workflow
Business onboarding stalls in the ownership layer. The company checks out, then someone spends three days tracing holding companies across two registries to find out who actually controls it. Zyphe purchases the authoritative register record, traces ownership to natural persons, and runs full KYC on every owner it finds, without leaving the platform.
What is KYB software?
KYB software automates Know Your Business checks: it verifies a company's registration against official registries, maps its ownership structure to identify ultimate beneficial owners, screens those owners against sanctions and PEP lists, and records the evidence for audit.
The registry lookup is the easy part, and every vendor does it. What separates KYB platforms is what happens after: resolving a group structure across jurisdictions, deciding who actually crosses the beneficial-ownership threshold, verifying those individuals as people, and proving all of it eighteen months later.
Trusted by those who trust no one.
“The KYB feature stands out with a good UI and a lot of information like UBO and financials. I also appreciate that their compliance features offset efforts from my compliance team, which is very helpful.”
From company name to UBOs, in your brand
Enter a company name and the registry does the rest. The ownership structure resolves layer by layer down to the ultimate beneficial owners, in a flow that carries your brand, with thresholds and traversal depth yours to configure.
- White-label: your logo, colors and domain
- Registry-sourced ownership, layer by layer
- UBO thresholds and traversal depth you control
Coverage and depth, stated plainly
Official registries. The record is purchased live for each verification, not read from a cached dataset.
Register latency is published per country: seconds, minutes, or days where a record is retrieved by hand.
Default UBO threshold, direct or indirect, with stakes multiplied along each chain. Configurable per flow.
Live register data, not a cached dataset
When an applicant submits, Zyphe purchases the authoritative register record, the verification moves to ENRICHING, and the submitted details are graded against it. The applicant form can be prefilled from a register search, so the company does not retype what the register already knows. For status and filing checks, live versus cached decides whether you are verifying the company or last quarter's snapshot of it. The register lookup is included in the flat KYB price; ownership discovery is metered separately.
UBO confirmed · J. Reeves
What a KYB check covers
Know Your Business is customer due diligence applied to a company instead of a person. Zyphe runs the five steps most teams still spread across registries, spreadsheets and a second identity vendor.
Company registration and status
Confirm the entity exists, is active, and matches the name, number and address the applicant gave you, against the official register record rather than a copy of it.
Ownership structure and UBOs
Follow corporate shareholders through every available tier until the trace reaches natural persons, with truncated and unresolved branches shown rather than hidden.
Directors and officers
Identify the people who control the company without owning it, and choose per flow whether to run full KYC on owners, directors, or both.
Sanctions, PEP and adverse media
Screen the company and every person identified, with a 0 to 100 banded risk score and a count of contributing sources on each match, at onboarding and on re-screening.
Ongoing monitoring and audit trail
Record what was checked, when, against which source and who approved it, then re-verify on material change so the file stays defensible after onboarding.
How Zyphe runs KYB
Register purchase, ownership discovery with a budget you control, and a linked identity check on every owner, in one API-first flow.
Send a company name or registration number via the dashboard or API, or let the applicant prefill from a register search. Zyphe purchases the authoritative register record and grades the submission against it.
Discovery follows corporate shareholders through every available tier until it reaches natural persons. The bound is a per-verification credit budget you set; the worked example in our documentation runs six tiers deep, and a reviewer can extend any truncated branch node by node behind a cost preview.
Each identified UBO and director receives a linked KYC flow with an email invitation and scheduled reminders, and the KYB cannot be approved until it completes. PEP and sanctions screening runs on the company and on every person identified.
No central database of UBO passports
Owners' identity documents and biometrics are processed transiently, then encrypted, sharded and stored in each individual's own vault. Zyphe retains the verification results, the audit log and the cryptographic proofs, which is the case file your examiner asks for, without a central store of directors' passports that a breach could expose.
Where data is stored, what is retained, and the audit status: the security and trust pageCoverage and speed, stated honestly
"Which countries, and how fast?" is the most-asked question on a KYB demo, and most vendors answer it with "global coverage". Coverage is decided per country and falls into three tiers:
We would rather you knew which tier your markets sit in before you signed than after. Ask us about your specific countries and we will tell you.
- Seconds
- Direct API access to a machine-readable register.
- Minutes
- Retrieval requires an intermediate step before the record is graded.
- Days
- The record is retrieved by hand, because the register offers no programmatic access.
- No coverage
- The flow falls back to applicant declaration, clearly marked as declared rather than verified, so a gap is a visible risk decision and not a silent one.
Ownership discovery: what happens at the edges
Two failure modes decide whether KYB output can be trusted, and most platforms handle both badly.
An unresolved branch you can see is a risk decision. An unresolved branch a platform hides from you is a finding waiting to happen.
- When the budget runs out
- Branches are marked truncated and stay visible. A reviewer can extend them node by node, each time behind a cost preview and per-node caps. You decide what another layer is worth; the system never stops silently and presents the result as complete.
- When a branch reaches a jurisdiction with no register
- It remains visible as an unresolved branch. The entity is held as a UBO proxy and is never reported as a natural-person UBO. A corporate entity does not get quietly promoted into the UBO field to make the output look finished. If discovery cannot complete at all, the applicant is asked to declare the owners, again marked as declared.
- Threshold logic
- 25% direct or indirect, configurable. Indirect holdings multiply along each chain: a person holding 50% of an entity that owns 60% of your customer holds 30% and is a UBO. Where nobody crosses the threshold, a documented fallback applies in order, control through other means, then senior managing officials or directors, with the basis recorded.
KYC on every owner, in the same workflow
KYB ends with people, and this is where most implementations leak. A UBO identified in one system and never verified in another is among the most common findings in supervisory reviews of business onboarding: an integration failure that reads as a compliance failure.
In Zyphe, each identified UBO and director gets a linked KYC flow, an email invitation with scheduled reminders, and the KYB cannot be approved until it completes. That is an enforced gate, not a task list. Where full verification is not required, a flow can screen people by name only, set separately for owners and directors; owners found by automatic discovery are always screened by name at minimum.
KYB pricing
Priced per jurisdiction of the company verified, with the register lookup included in that flat price. Ownership discovery is metered on top: the traversal is charged, and so is each node a reviewer chooses to extend, always behind a cost preview, with per-node caps you set.
This is deliberate. A single-entity UK company and a six-tier structure across four jurisdictions are not the same piece of work. Pricing them the same means either overcharging simple cases or capping complex ones. We would rather show you the price of the next layer and let you decide.
How to choose a KYB provider
Use this on us too.
- Registry coverage, named
- Which registers, which countries, live or cached, and how fast? "Global coverage" is not an answer. Ours is 240+ registries across three published latency tiers.
- Ownership depth
- How many layers before it gives up, and what happens then? Ask to see a genuinely complex structure resolved, and ask specifically what the platform does when it cannot finish.
- Unresolved branches
- Does the platform show you what it could not resolve, or present a partial answer as a complete one? This is the question that separates the category.
- UBO logic
- Configurable threshold? Indirect holdings multiplied along the chain? A documented fallback when nobody crosses 25%?
- KYC on the owners
- Included in the same workflow, or a second vendor and a second integration?
- Audit output
- Ask for a real export from a real case, not a screenshot of the dashboard.
- Where we are weaker
- KYB coverage depends on what each government makes accessible, and director data is frequently missing from official sources. We supplement it from additional providers, but it varies by jurisdiction. If your book concentrates in markets with thin registers, ask us about those countries before you commit. We would rather lose the deal than the renewal.
Bring us a structure that breaks your current process
The honest test of KYB software is not a clean single-entity company. Bring the one that took your team three days, and watch where the trace stops, what it shows you when it does, and what the next layer costs.
Book a demo →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"}'
Explore other AI compliance agents
Zyphe's KYC, KYB and AML agents run on the same privacy-first audit substrate and share the same case management, audit trail and decision logic.
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Sanctions, PEP, watchlist and adverse media screening with a banded score and the number of contributing sources, alongside a deterministic transaction monitoring engine that returns Allow, Review or Block.
Learn more →Frequent Questions
KYB software automates Know Your Business verification: checking a company's registration and status against official registries, mapping ownership to identify ultimate beneficial owners, screening those owners, and retaining the evidence for audit. What is KYB? Read the glossary entry
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. In Zyphe the two run as one workflow, so a UBO identified is a UBO verified. Read the full KYC vs KYB comparison
There is no fixed limit. Traversal continues through every available tier until it reaches natural persons; the bound is a per-verification credit budget you set. The worked example in our documentation runs six tiers, and reviewers can extend truncated branches node by node with a cost preview.
An ultimate beneficial owner is the natural person who ultimately owns or controls a company, directly or through intermediate entities. Zyphe applies a configurable 25% threshold covering direct and indirect holdings, with stakes multiplied along each chain. UBO explained
The branch stays visible as unresolved and the entity is held as a UBO proxy, never reported as a natural-person UBO. Where a documented fallback applies, control through other means or senior managing officials are recorded with the basis. If discovery cannot complete, the applicant is asked to declare owners, marked as declared.
It depends on the country. Register access falls into three tiers: seconds, minutes, or days where the record must be retrieved by hand. Ownership discovery adds time proportional to the complexity of the structure, and each owner's identity check runs in parallel.
Verified. Each identified UBO and director receives a linked KYC flow with email invitations and reminders, and the KYB cannot be approved until it completes. See the KYC flow every owner completes
Yes. Ownership and status change without telling you. Ongoing monitoring with re-verification on material change is the expected standard, and it is how the case file stays defensible after onboarding. Explore ongoing UBO screening
KYB Readiness Score
Benchmark your Know Your Business verification, UBO discovery and entity due-diligence workflow against industry best practice.Explore more Zyphe products
UBO Screening
that recurses until it finds the real owners
UBO screening software that recurses through holding companies until it reaches the natural persons in control. Effective ownership computed through the chain, every hop evidenced from official registries.
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that stops fraud at onboarding, not in the chargeback report
Fraud detection software that catches forged documents, synthetic identities and injection attacks at onboarding, before the account is ever opened, and keeps watching after it.
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 →