Briefed Atlas
KYB: what know your business checks actually require.
Know your business is a regulatory requirement for most firms dealing with corporate counterparties. What it requires in practice, where the data comes from, and what separates a defensible process from one that passes onboarding but fails an audit.
What a KYB check covers.
A complete KYB process is more than a Companies House lookup. These are the standard components.
Legal existence and registration
Confirming the company is registered, active and in good standing with the relevant authority. For UK entities, this means checking the Companies House record: incorporation date, registered address, SIC codes, and filing status.
Ownership and control
Identifying who owns or controls the business, typically to the 25 per cent threshold, and tracing that ownership to the natural persons behind any corporate layers. This is the PSC and UBO check, and it is the part that most manual KYB processes do incompletely.
Directors and officers
Confirming who is authorised to act for the company, and running those individuals against sanctions lists, politically exposed persons databases and adverse media. Director checks require current and historical records, since an individual removed as a director last quarter may still be relevant.
Sanctions and watchlists
Screening the entity and its associated individuals against OFAC, OFSI, EU and UN sanctions lists. This is a point-in-time check and needs to be repeated periodically for ongoing relationships.
Corporate structure and group
Understanding where the entity sits in its wider corporate group, including parent companies, subsidiaries and affiliates. A counterparty that looks clean in isolation may be a subsidiary of a sanctioned group.
Where most KYB processes fall short.
The onboarding check passes. The audit does not.
Stopping at the immediate PSC
If the PSC of your counterparty is itself a company, that company has its own PSC register. A KYB process that stops at the first record has not identified the ultimate beneficial owner. It has identified the first layer of a chain of unknown depth.
The question regulators ask is who controls it, not who owns it on paper.
Point-in-time data treated as live
A Companies House record downloaded at onboarding is correct at that moment. Directors resign. Ownership structures change. A counterparty whose profile was clean at onboarding may look different six months later. Ongoing monitoring requires a data source that updates, not a file attachment in a deal folder.
Regulators expect periodic refresh, not just onboarding.
No provenance on ownership figures
A beneficial ownership percentage that cannot be traced to a specific filing is not defensible in a regulatory inquiry. The question is not just what the ownership is, but what document established it, when it was valid, and whether the source can be opened and checked by a third party.
An answer without a source is a liability.
Common questions.
What is KYB?
KYB stands for Know Your Business. It is the process of verifying the identity, ownership, and legitimacy of a business counterparty before entering a commercial or regulated relationship. KYB is required by anti-money laundering regulations for most regulated firms, and is common practice in financial services, payments, and professional services more broadly.
What is the difference between KYC and KYB?
KYC (Know Your Customer) refers to verifying the identity of an individual. KYB applies the same principle to legal entities, which requires additional steps: verifying the company's legal existence, identifying its beneficial owners, and checking the directors and officers. In practice, a full KYB process includes KYC checks on the individuals identified through the ownership and director lookup.
What regulations require KYB?
In the UK, the Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing and Transfer of Funds Regulations 2017 require regulated firms to carry out customer due diligence on legal entity clients, including identifying the beneficial owners. Similar requirements exist across the EU under the Anti-Money Laundering Directives, in the US under FinCEN's Customer Due Diligence rule, and in most major financial jurisdictions.
What is a company director check?
A company director check verifies the directors currently appointed to a company, their appointment dates, and their personal details as filed with Companies House. A thorough director check also covers historical directorships at other companies, to identify patterns such as repeated insolvencies or associations with high-risk entities.
How often should KYB checks be repeated?
Regulators expect ongoing monitoring, not just onboarding checks. The frequency depends on the risk profile of the relationship: high-risk counterparties typically require annual or more frequent reviews. Any material change to the counterparty, such as a change of ownership or director, should trigger a refresh.
What data sources does a KYB process use?
The primary sources for UK KYB are Companies House (company registration, filing history, director records) and the PSC register (beneficial ownership). These are supplemented by sanctions lists, PEP databases, adverse media screening, and commercial databases that aggregate and resolve data across registers. For complex or high-risk structures, additional sources including overseas registers may be needed.
Ownership data that holds up when somebody checks.
Briefed Atlas provides structured ownership and director data, with the source filing behind every record, queryable over an API or in bulk. For compliance teams running KYB at scale, or engineering teams building KYB into an onboarding pipeline, Atlas gives you resolved beneficial ownership data rather than raw register records that still need entity matching and chain resolution on your end.
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The ontology, the document corpus and the ownership graph, delivered into systems you already run, or worked directly by our team when the problem needs it.