From today, users of the award-winning business KYC (KYB) solution will be able to access, review and download company data and official incorporation documents from 123 countries worldwide, both via Know Your Customer’s highly intuitive user interface and through a single API.

Identifying a company through official government sources and mapping its shareholding structure is one of the most essential and time-consuming steps of any corporate onboarding and know your business (KYB) process. Accessing a company’s filing documents such as the Certificate of Incorporation, Annual Returns, Memorandum & Articles of Association can be a daunting task, especially when onboarding clients registered in a foreign country or with a complex and multi-jurisdictional structure.

By providing real-time access to 500+ local company registries across 123 countries and automated data extraction and shareholder identification from official documents, Know Your Customer enables financial institutions to minimise AML, fraud and financial crime risks. This approach ensures audit-proof documentary evidence to meet financial regulators’ most stringent requirements, ultimately strengthening the global financial system’s line of defence against money laundering and terrorism financing.

To drive meaningful digital transformation and large-scale operational efficiency, Know Your Customer’s proprietary technology doesn’t simply provide access to the registries. The system also extracts shareholder information from filing documents, identifies Ultimate Beneficial Owners (UBOs) across jurisdictions using AI techniques and unravels multiple layers of corporate ownership structures automatically. At the centre of the platform is a real-time graph database mapping the relationship of individuals connected to corporate entities under investigation and the result is a holistic picture of each corporate customer’s ownership and control structure based exclusively on real-time and official corporate information.

With this unprecedented expansion, Know Your Customer’s registry coverage now includes 41 countries across the Middle East, Africa and the Americas, in addition to 82 countries across APAC and Europe, including potentially challenging registries for international businesses such as Hong Kong, Mainland China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Cayman Islands and British Virgin Islands (BVIs). As a result, users of Know Your Customer now have access to reliable, up-to-the-minute company information on more than 180 million registered companies worldwide and to 300 million official company documents.

Claus Christensen, CEO & Co-Founder of Know Your Customer, commented:
“Our mission is to streamline business KYC operations and strengthen overall compliance through primary source data. With this coverage expansion, we aim to further support the global growth of our existing and future clients by simplifying and standardising their access to official company data worldwide. We are delighted to announce that this release makes Know Your Customer the Number 1 Provider of real-time international registry connections in the industry, providing seamless business verification in 123 countries globally.”