KYB

Know Your Business. Customer due diligence applied to a company rather than a person. It establishes that the entity legally exists, what it trades, where it operates, and who ultimately owns and controls it.

The last part is where most applications stall. Ownership has to be traced through every intermediate holding entity until the chain reaches named human beings. A structure running through a holding company, a nominee and a trust has to be followed to the end, and an applicant who cannot supply that cannot be onboarded, whatever their own standing.

Providers also ask what the business actually does, in operational terms. "General trading" satisfies nobody. What you buy, from which countries, what you sell, to whom, and roughly what that is worth each month is the answer the file needs.

Verification is checked against source registries, not against the document uploaded, so a discrepancy between a trade licence and a shareholder register stops the file.