Manual or Automated KYB?

Fraud and money laundering are growing threats to the B2B industry. In 2021,  98% of B2B retailers, manufacturers and marketplaces had experienced financial losses due to successful fraud attacks. To stay safe, businesses need to do a number of things to answer the following two questions: 1. Can I work with that business ? It’s the compliance side of the KYB, and 2. Do I want to take the risk to onboard that business ? That’s the fraud side of the KYB. Let’s deep dive into what KYB or Know Your Business is.
Aymeric Boëlle

The Ancient World

The KYB process is complex and requires companies to collect, analyze, and manage vast amounts of data on the businesses that they have relationships with. Doing this manually is typically even more complicated and time-consuming as it requires:

  • creating in-house compliance infrastructure with tech teams and compliance officers (Product), or
  • having compliance analysts use a myriad of data, compliance and fraud products each used to verify one sub-part of the overall KYB resulting in a fragmented audit trail.

Both options are sub-optimal and businesses are looking at changing this way of approaching KYB.

On the other side of the spectrum, automated KYB can be done and is just a new way of fighting money laundering and fraud. Automated workflows verify companies and individuals in real-time while ensuring regulatory compliance, fraud prevention and seamless onboarding.

How Does Ondorse’s KYB Solution Work ?

Ondorse combines automated KYB and KYC checks into one solution that fully automates company verification, AML screening, ID. verification, AML risk scoring, fraud checks on emails, phone, bank details and so on.

But before proceeding with the full KYB verification flow, businesses need to request from their customers information in a structured manner (forms filled-in). Not documents like certificates of incorporation, as it used to be.

That’s all possible now thanks to the creation and openness of official company registers, insolvency registers and UBO registers throughout Europe. Contrary to a certificate of incorporation (K-bis or Handelsregister) that can be forged, businesses can now directly source information on companies from official registers to guarantee data integrity.

KYB verification steps

Below are 3 steps to effective KYB verification:

Step 1: Collecting company data

Here, as a business, you want to request the minimum information possible to avoid onboarding friction. At the same time, you should request information in a structured manner, rather than in the form of documents, to automate the comparison process against the official registers.

Step 2: Collecting information on the account owner

Same, you want to request the bare minimum but enough to run a number of fraud tests. Limit yourself to an email and/or a phone number, an ID. and the account owner’s position within the company (is he/she a legal representative?)

Step 3: Use Ondorse

Use Ondorse and its 25+ integrated data sources, fraud and compliance APIs to cover the entire verification spectrum which will result in an aggregated view of a business customer. What better way but to assess a dozen different criteria on a single customer to check that all signals are consistent ?

Conclusion

All in all: a good KYB is no KYB at all - meaning that you should request the least information as possible to minimize onboarding friction and let Ondorse get that information and run the verifications for you.