Know Your Business (KYB)
Know Your Business (KYB) is verifying a company before it can transact — its legal existence, ownership and the people behind it, not just one individual.
Know Your Business, or KYB, is the verification a regulated business runs on a company before letting it transact — confirming the entity legally exists, is who it claims to be, and identifying the people who own and control it.
How it works
- The business’s registration, address and status are checked against official registries.
- Ownership is traced to its beneficial owners — the real people behind the entity — and those individuals are run through KYC.
- Directors and signatories are verified, so it’s clear who can act for the company.
Where KYC answers “is this person real?”, KYB answers “is this company real, and who’s actually behind it?”.
Why it matters
Onboarding businesses — sellers, vendors, sub-merchants — carries more risk than onboarding individuals, because a shell company can hide bad actors behind layers of ownership. For a marketplace that pays those businesses, weak KYB means paying money into the dark. Done well, it lets a platform onboard real sellers fast while keeping the fraudulent ones out.
How Fynex does it
Fynex, an FCA-authorised e-money institution, runs KYB and KYC inside your own flow so businesses onboard without a hand-off to a third party. See seller onboarding.