What is KYB verification?

Know Your Business is the process of confirming that a business counterparty is what it claims to be — that the legal entity exists, is currently active, is registered at the address it gives, and is controlled by the people it says control it. It is the corporate equivalent of KYC, required in regulated sectors and increasingly expected as ordinary commercial diligence when onboarding suppliers, partners and merchants.

Which fields should a KYB check confirm?

At minimum: the registration number, the exact legal name, current status (active, dissolved, in liquidation), registration date, registered address, legal form, and — where the register publishes it — directors and beneficial owners. Status and registration date are the two that catch the most problems, because a dissolved entity and a company incorporated three weeks ago are both red flags that a name-only check misses completely.

Do official registers prove a company is trustworthy?

No, and this is the most important limitation to understand. A register proves existence, status and filed facts. It does not prove solvency, honesty or that the company does what it claims. Registration is an administrative act, not an endorsement. KYB tells you a counterparty is real and currently active — the commercial judgment about whether to trade with it is separate and needs other evidence.

How do you verify a company in a country whose register you cannot read?

Work from structured data rather than the portal interface. Registration numbers, status codes, dates and activity codes are language-independent, so a pipeline built on those fields works identically whether the underlying register publishes in Czech, Korean or Portuguese. Only free-text fields need translation, and they are rarely the fields a verification decision turns on.

Is company register data free?

In most jurisdictions the core identity data is free and open, because transparency about who is trading is a public good. Depth varies enormously: some registers publish full financial statements and beneficial ownership, others publish only name, number and status. The variation in depth, not access, is what makes cross-border KYB work harder than it looks.

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KYB: verifying a business against the register that created it

Every company that legally exists was entered into a register by a government, and in most of the world that register is public. KYB — Know Your Business is simply the discipline of checking a counterparty against it before you trade. This guide covers what to verify, what a register can and cannot prove, and how to run the check across borders when every country publishes something slightly different.

The five checks that matter

A KYB check that only confirms "a company with this name exists" is barely a check at all. Five fields carry almost all the value:

Check	Field	What it catches
Existence	Registration number	Entirely fictional counterparties
Currency	Status	Dissolved, struck off, in liquidation
Maturity	Registration date	Shell incorporated last month for this deal
Location	Registered address	Address given does not match the register
Control	Directors / beneficial owners	The person signing has no authority

Status and registration date do the heaviest lifting. A dissolved entity still has a name, a website and often a working phone number — the register is the only place the dissolution shows. And a company incorporated three weeks before a large first order is a pattern worth pausing on, which no amount of web research surfaces as cleanly as one date field.

What registers do not prove

This deserves stating plainly, because KYB is regularly oversold. A register entry proves that an entity was registered, is in a given status, and filed certain facts. It does not prove:

Solvency. A company can be active in the register and unable to pay. Where accounts are filed — most of Europe — you have a financial signal; where they are not, you have none.
Honesty. Registration is an administrative act. Nobody assessed the business.
That it does what it claims. Activity codes are self-declared and frequently stale.
That it is trading. Active status and actually operating are different things. A dormant company is active.

KYB establishes that a counterparty is real and currently registered. The commercial judgment sits on top of that and needs other evidence — hiring activity, contract awards, digital footprint — each of which shows a business doing something rather than merely existing.

Coverage: 28 jurisdictions, one shape

We maintain register coverage across the following, each reading from the official source rather than an aggregator:

Region	Jurisdictions	Guide
United Kingdom	Companies House, charities, food premises	UK local business →
France	Sirene (SIREN / SIRET)	France →
Nordics	Denmark, Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia	Nordics & Baltics →
Central & Eastern Europe	Czechia, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia	Eastern Europe →
Latin America	Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Peru	Latin America →
Asia-Pacific	Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, Australia	Asia-Pacific →
India	Corporate registry, listed companies, suppliers	India →
North America	Canada federal, US state registers, charities	US state registries →
Israel	Corporate registry	—

Plus the global identity layer: the LEI system and SEC filings, which is where cross-border entity resolution actually gets solved.

The cross-border problem, and how to avoid it

Running KYB in one country is straightforward. Running it in twenty is where pipelines break, and the failures are predictable:

Depth varies wildly. Some registers publish full accounts and beneficial ownership; others publish name, number and status. Design your check to degrade gracefully — a rule that requires a director name will fail in every jurisdiction that does not publish one, and that is a design bug, not a data gap.
Status vocabularies differ. "Active", "in liquidation", "struck off", "dormant" and their local equivalents do not map one-to-one. Normalise to your own small set of states early, and keep the original code alongside it.
Names are not keys. Legal-form suffixes, transliteration and brand-versus-registered-name differences make cross-border name matching unreliable. Join on registration numbers within a jurisdiction, on LEI across them, and on verified domain when neither exists.
One entity is not one company. A group has a separate registered entity in each country. Verifying the local subsidiary tells you nothing about the parent, and vice versa — which is exactly the gap parent relationships in the LEI system fill.

You do not need to read the language

A common objection to working directly with foreign registers is that the portals are in languages nobody on the team reads. In practice this matters much less than it seems, because the fields a verification decision turns on are language-independent: registration numbers, status codes, dates, activity codes, address components.

Build the pipeline on structured fields and it behaves identically whether the source publishes in Czech, Korean or Portuguese. Only free-text — the activity description, the company objects clause — needs translation, and those are rarely decisive. The register interface is a language problem; the register data is not.

A minimum viable KYB pipeline

Resolve the counterparty to a registration number in its home jurisdiction.
Pull the official record: legal name, status, registration date, address, legal form, officers where published.
Normalise status into your own vocabulary, keeping the original.
Flag on the two high-yield rules: not active, and registered very recently relative to the value at stake.
Resolve the group via LEI parent relationships if the counterparty is part of one.
Re-check on a cycle. Status changes. A verification from eighteen months ago is a historical fact, not a current one.

Step six is the one most often skipped and the one that causes real losses. Companies dissolve after you onboarded them.

Frequently asked questions

What is KYB?

Confirming a business counterparty exists, is active, is where it says it is, and is controlled by who it says — from the official register.

Which fields matter most?

Status and registration date catch the most problems; number, address and officers complete the picture.

Does registration mean a company is legitimate?

No. It proves existence and status. It proves nothing about solvency, honesty or whether the business actually trades.

Can I run KYB in a language I do not read?

Yes — numbers, status codes, dates and activity codes are language-independent, and those are the decisive fields.

Browse all company registers → Read the country guides