Building smarter KYB workflows: key insights from Persona’s practical guide

Mirela Ciobanu, Lead Editor at The Paypers, highlights Persona’s key insights to help financial institutions and fintechs automate and strengthen Know Your Business (KYB) workflows - improving compliance, fraud prevention, and customer trust.

 

A new guide from identity verification company Persona, A Practical Guide for Building a Highly Effective KYB Process, outlines how businesses can design KYB workflows that enhance compliance, reduce fraud, and improve onboarding efficiency. The report highlights the differences between KYB and KYC, the essential components of a modern KYB program, and best practices drawn from real-world implementations in fintech/FIs settings.

A modern approach to KYB

What would it look like if businesses could verify new partners or suppliers quickly, confidently, and with minimal manual effort? For financial institutions and fintechs, that’s the goal of Know Your Business (KYB) - and according to experts at Persona, it’s becoming achievable with the right combination of automation and identity intelligence.    

'As our product offering shifted toward a more global customer base, we needed a KYB solution that provided global support', says Ryan Bozarth, Co-founder and CEO of Dakota. 'Ideally, one that also included KYC components that could be used to complete ultimate beneficial ownership (UBO) verification, so we didn’t need two different solutions'.

Persona’s guide breaks down what effective KYB looks like and how organisations can design workflows that work for their risk, compliance, and customer experience goals.

KYB vs. KYC: understanding the difference

KYB verifies the legitimacy of companies and the individuals behind them, ensuring they are real, trustworthy, and compliant. While KYC (Know Your Customer) focuses on individuals, KYB extends that framework to include business entities and their ultimate beneficial owners (UBOs), those who own a controlling percentage of the company (usually between 10-25%).

KYB is essential for three primary reasons:

1. Regulatory compliance - mandated under AML/CFT regulations and FATF rules.
2. Fraud prevention - detecting shell companies and false identities.
3. Trust and safety - ensuring businesses operate ethically and transparently.

For businesses in the financial sector, different jurisdictions enforce KYB under various frameworks.

• In the US, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) sets customer due diligence rules.
• In the EU, the 5th Anti-Money Laundering Directive (AMLD5) requires financial institutions to identify and verify business clients.

Overall, nearly every country or region has its own regulations around KYB and screening businesses.

KYB and KYC are interconnected: verifying a company is incomplete without verifying its owners. Together, they form the foundation of compliance and anti-fraud programs.

Key components of a modern KYB process

Business documentation: certificates of incorporation, shareholder registries, and official registration records.

• Business verification: screening against watchlists, sanctions lists, and adverse media databases.
• UBO verification: confirming the identity of beneficial owners and screening them against sanctions and PEP lists.
• Manual review: secondary checks for edge cases.
• Ongoing monitoring: ensuring company and ownership data remain up to date.

An effective KYB system balances these elements within a clear workflow: defining what qualifies as approval, what triggers further verification, and when to reject applications.

Balancing fraud prevention, compliance, and conversion

The challenge for most organisations is balancing strict compliance with seamless onboarding. Overly rigid verification can increase friction and drop-offs, while lenient checks can expose the platform to risk.

Persona’s guide recommends:

• Automation wherever possible. Integrate data sources and verification vendors into a single platform to reduce duplication.
• If-this-then-that logic. Automate follow-ups, e.g., if a document fails verification, trigger a secondary check.
• Dynamic workflows. Adjust the depth of verification based on the business type, jurisdiction, or transaction volume.
• User experience optimisation. Collect only the minimum information required while maintaining compliance.

Manual review remains vital, but teams must have unified access to all business and individual data to act quickly and accurately.

Case studies: KYB in practice

With Persona, a travel booking and payments platform for multi-day and group travel companies, WeTravel completes KYB verification faster, reducing user abandonment from weeks to hours. ‘The whole process is massively improved…we can verify users in less than 10 minutes if all information is correct,’ says Dave Barrett, KYC Manager. Persona has also transformed team operations, improving alignment, accuracy, and accountability. Onboarding new hires now takes two weeks instead of four to six weeks.

To ensure secure, compliant fund transfers, 6lock, a payments platform serving private equity firms, integrated Persona to power its KYC, KYB, and fraud prevention workflows.

Using Persona’s government ID and selfie verification, 6lock authenticates users during onboarding and re-verifies them before payouts adding a critical layer of fraud protection. On the KYB side, UBO and business checks help clients stay compliant with evolving regulations. ‘We’re required to perform OFAC checks on a recurring basis to meet the continuous monitoring requirement of KYC. Being able to automate some of those workflows for verification and reverification was an important consideration for us’, says Peter Steppe, Chief Security Officer, 6lock.

These examples demonstrate that automated KYB workflows not only improve compliance but also enhance operational efficiency and user satisfaction.

Best practices for designing KYB workflows

Persona’s guide outlines several recommendations for designing scalable, compliant, and adaptable KYB systems:

1. Define clear objectives. Determine the primary purpose of KYB (compliance, fraud prevention, or safety) and align the process accordingly.
2. Centralise data. Use one platform to manage signals, documents, and checks in real time.
3. Design for flexibility. Build flows adaptable to different jurisdictions and evolving regulations.
4. Integrate automation and manual review. Automation speeds up processing, while manual oversight ensures accuracy for complex cases.
5. Revisit regularly. Fraud patterns and regulations change; so should KYB processes.

This approach ensures businesses maintain compliance while minimising friction and preserving user trust.

Why KYB matters more than ever

Effective KYB enables financial institutions and fintechs to meet AML/CFT regulations, detect fraud, and build confidence among regulators, partners, and users.
It ensures that potential partners or clients are legitimate, not involved in money laundering, terrorist financing, or other illicit activities by screening for sanctions, politically exposed persons (PEPs), and adverse media.

KYB also strengthens internal fraud detection. By monitoring the data signals collected during onboarding, businesses can spot red flags such as recurring name patterns or suspicious document similarities. Automation and ‘if-this-then-that’ workflows can flag these anomalies instantly, reducing manual investigation time.

Ultimately, a well-structured KYB program helps businesses save time, reduce losses, and improve conversion rates while maintaining compliance integrity.

Conclusion: building trust through smarter KYB

As compliance requirements grow and fraud tactics evolve, Know Your Business has become a strategic necessity rather than a regulatory checkbox. Persona’s guide highlights how combining automation, intelligent verification, and continuous monitoring can help businesses scale with confidence.

By adopting these practices, financial institutions and fintechs can protect their platforms, satisfy regulators, and maintain trust - all while delivering a seamless experience to legitimate partners.

 

About author

 

Mirela Ciobanu is Lead Editor at The Paypers, specialising in the Banking and Fintech domain. With a keen eye for industry trends, she is constantly on the lookout for the latest developments in digital assets, regtech, payment innovation, and fraud prevention. Mirela is particularly passionate about crypto, blockchain, DeFi, and fincrime investigations, and is a strong advocate for online data privacy and protection. As a skilled writer, Mirela strives to deliver accurate and informative insights to her readers, always in pursuit of the most compelling version of the truth. Connect with Mirela on LinkedIn or reach out via email at mirelac@thepaypers.com.