Know Your Customer (KYC) is the verification of a natural person — confirming their identity using government-issued documents and, where required, biometrics. Know Your Business (KYB) verifies a legal entity — its registration, structure, directors, and the natural persons who ultimately own or control it (the Ultimate Beneficial Owners, or UBOs).
In practice, a KYB engagement nearly always includes one or more KYC sub-flows: every UBO and authorised signatory is itself a KYC subject. This is why our platform prices KYB on a per-UBO basis — a sole director company costs less to verify than a four-partner partnership, and the price should reflect that.
The compliance pitfall we see most often is firms treating KYB as a heavier version of KYC and applying it to entities only. That misses the substance: the regulator wants to know which humans are behind the entity. A KYB workflow that does not identify and verify each UBO is not a complete KYB workflow.
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