What are the KYB requirements? See the documents, the UBO thresholds, the US, EU and UK rules, and a practical KYB compliance checklist for onboarding.
Table of contents
- KYB requirements are the checks a regulated firm must complete to verify a business customer: confirm the entity, identify its beneficial owners, screen for risk, and monitor over time.
- At the core sits beneficial ownership: rules generally require identifying the natural people who own or control 25 percent or more of the company.
- The specifics differ by regime, US rules under the Bank Secrecy Act and FinCEN, EU rules under the AML package, UK rules under the Money Laundering Regulations, but the shape is the same.
- Documentary requirements typically include registration details, proof of the ownership structure, and identity verification of the beneficial owners and directors.
- KYB requirements are not satisfied by a one-time check; ongoing monitoring of ownership and risk is part of the obligation.
- A practical KYB compliance checklist turns these requirements into repeatable steps, which automation can then run at speed.
KYB requirements are the obligations a regulated firm must meet to verify a business customer: confirming the company is legally registered, identifying and verifying the ultimate beneficial owners who own or control it, screening the business and owners for financial-crime risk, and monitoring over time. The beneficial-ownership threshold is commonly 25 percent.
TL;DR
KYB requirements oblige a regulated firm to verify a business customer: confirm the entity is registered and operating, identify and verify its ultimate beneficial owners (generally those owning or controlling 25 percent or more), screen the business and owners for risk, and monitor over time. The details vary, US rules under FinCEN and the Bank Secrecy Act, EU rules under the AML package, UK rules under the Money Laundering Regulations, but the structure is consistent. Documentary requirements cover registration, ownership and identity verification of owners and directors. A KYB compliance checklist turns this into repeatable steps that automation can run quickly.
What are KYB requirements?
KYB requirements are the specific things a regulated firm must do to satisfy its Know Your Business duties before, and during, a relationship with a business customer. They exist because anti-money-laundering law requires firms not just to know their individual customers but to understand the companies they deal with and, above all, the people who ultimately stand behind those companies.
At the highest level, the KYB requirements are consistent everywhere: identify and verify the business itself, identify and verify its beneficial owners, understand the nature and purpose of the relationship, screen for sanctions and other risk, and keep the information current. What varies between jurisdictions is the detail, the exact thresholds, the documentation expected, and how prescriptive the rules are. This guide sets out the common shape of those requirements and turns them into a checklist, building on our overview of what KYB is and how KYB verification works in practice.
What documents and data do KYB requirements demand?
Meeting KYB obligations starts with collecting and verifying a defined set of information. For the entity, that means its legal name, registration or company number, registered address, jurisdiction of incorporation, legal form, and current status, confirmed against official corporate registries. Where the business operates in a licensed sector, evidence of the relevant licences or permits is also expected.
For ownership, the requirements demand documentation of the ownership and control structure sufficient to identify the ultimate beneficial owners, which may include shareholder registers, incorporation documents, and, where available, entries from beneficial-ownership registers. For the people, identity verification of the beneficial owners and, typically, the directors is required, to the same standard as individual KYC. Finally, screening data is needed to check the business and its owners against sanctions, PEP and adverse-media sources. The precise documents accepted vary by jurisdiction and risk level, with higher-risk relationships triggering enhanced due diligence and more extensive evidence.
What are the KYB requirements in the US, EU and UK?
The three major regimes share the same objectives through different instruments. In the United States, KYB obligations flow from the Bank Secrecy Act and FinCEN's Customer Due Diligence rule, which requires covered financial institutions to identify and verify the beneficial owners of legal-entity customers, alongside the separate beneficial-ownership reporting regime, whose scope was reshaped by 2025 rulemaking. The Corporate Transparency Act sits in this picture and is worth understanding in its own right.
In the European Union, the requirements come from the AML package, the AML Regulation and the sixth Directive, supervised by the new Anti-Money Laundering Authority, which harmonise customer due diligence and beneficial-ownership obligations across member states and maintain beneficial-ownership registers. In the United Kingdom, the Money Laundering Regulations impose equivalent duties, with Companies House holding company and, increasingly, beneficial-ownership information. Across all three, the common core is the same: verify the entity, identify and verify beneficial owners, screen, and monitor. Firms operating across borders must satisfy the strictest applicable standard, which is why a single, consistent process matters, the theme of an audit-ready compliance stack.
What is the UBO threshold for KYB?
The ultimate-beneficial-owner threshold is the ownership or control level at which a person must be identified as a beneficial owner. Across the major regimes it is commonly set at 25 percent: a natural person who owns or controls 25 percent or more of the shares or voting rights of a company is generally a beneficial owner who must be identified and verified. Control exercised by other means, such as the right to appoint or remove directors, can also make someone a beneficial owner even below that shareholding.
The threshold matters because it defines the depth of ownership resolution required. Meeting KYB obligations means tracing the structure until every person at or above the threshold is found, aggregating stakes that reach the same person through different holding companies. Some structures are deliberately arranged to keep owners just below 25 percent or hidden behind layers, so satisfying the requirement in practice depends on resolving ownership recursively rather than stopping at the first tier. Where no individual meets the threshold, regimes generally require identifying the senior managing officials instead, so there is always an accountable person on record.
What is the KYB compliance checklist?
A practical KYB compliance checklist turns the requirements into repeatable steps. Confirm the entity: verify legal name, registration number, address, jurisdiction, legal form and status against an official registry, plus any required licences. Map ownership: resolve the structure to identify every ultimate beneficial owner at or above the threshold, and record how each was determined. Verify the people: complete identity verification on the beneficial owners and directors.
Screen for risk: check the business, its directors and its owners against sanctions, PEP and adverse-media data, and document the outcome. Assess and record: form a risk rating for the relationship, understand its nature and purpose, and retain the evidence and reasoning. Set up monitoring: establish ongoing review so changes in ownership, control or risk are caught after onboarding. Keep records: retain the KYB evidence for the period the rules require, so the whole assessment can be reconstructed for an examiner. Running this checklist by hand is slow; running it through KYB software is what makes it fast and consistent.
What are the ongoing KYB requirements after onboarding?
KYB obligations do not end when a business is onboarded. Because ownership, control and risk change, the rules require firms to keep customer information current and to monitor the relationship over time. In practice this means periodically refreshing the KYB data, watching for changes to the ownership structure or directors, re-screening against updated sanctions, PEP and adverse-media data, and reacting when the risk profile shifts.
The trigger events matter: a new shareholder crossing the threshold, a director becoming a politically exposed person, a beneficial owner appearing on a sanctions list, or emerging adverse media are all things a firm is expected to detect and act on, not just at the next scheduled review but promptly. This is why perpetual, event-driven monitoring is increasingly the standard rather than a periodic re-check, the same shift covered in our comparison of perpetual and periodic KYC. Ongoing monitoring is not an optional extra on top of KYB requirements; it is part of them.
How does Zyphe help you meet KYB requirements?
Zyphe is built to satisfy KYB obligations end to end and at speed. Entity verification draws on more than 230 EU registries and coverage across 190 countries, so the registration, status and filings of a business can be confirmed against authoritative sources in almost any market. Ownership resolution is recursive, tracing layered structures to identify beneficial owners down to a 0.001 percent stake, so the 25 percent threshold is met even where control is arranged to stay hidden.
Every beneficial owner and director is then verified through chip-based identity checks with no image upload, and the business and its people are screened against sanctions, PEP and adverse-media data, with the risk assessment and evidence captured in an exportable audit trail. Monitoring continues after onboarding, so the ongoing element of KYB obligations is handled rather than left to manual diarised reviews. And because the platform is decentralised, the sensitive data gathered to meet these requirements is sharded rather than pooled, keeping compliance thorough without creating a breach target. Book a demo to map it to your obligations.
The bottom line
KYB obligations come down to four things, done to the standard your regime demands and kept current: verify the business, identify and verify its ultimate beneficial owners at the 25 percent threshold, screen the entity and those people for risk, and monitor the relationship over time. The US, EU and UK reach this through different laws but land in the same place, so a single, consistent process that satisfies the strictest applicable standard is the efficient way to comply. Turn the requirements into a checklist, automate the routine cases, keep an exportable audit trail, and treat monitoring as part of the obligation rather than an afterthought.
Related resources
- What is KYB (Know Your Business)?
- KYB verification: how it works
- The Corporate Transparency Act in 2026
- Building an audit-ready compliance stack
- KYB software
Cited sources
Michelangelo Frigo (Co-Founder at Zyphe) Michelangelo Frigo is a privacy and identity infrastructure expert and co-founder of Zyphe.