Recently, we held an online event where two Know Your Business (KYB) specialists discussed what the KYB process looks like today and how companies can build a seamless KYB-KYC experience. It was jam-packed with useful information — so much so that we split the recap into three!
In our first recap, we went over the KYB fundamentals like what it is and why it’s important. Then, we explored what the KYB process usually looks like — and why it’s so challenging.
To conclude this series, we’re covering how to build an efficient KYB process and how Persona can help. Let’s dig in!
What should you consider when building a Know Your Business process?
When implementing KYB at your company, some key aspects you may want to consider include:
- Conversion: How’s the user experience? You want to make sure the time between the business submitting their information and them being approved is as short as possible. If a user needs to write in multiple times to ask what’s going on, your KYB process may be scaring away users and hurting your conversion rate.
- Catching fraud: Are you able to catch illegitimate businesses, bad individuals associated with the business, and individuals falsely claiming to be part of the business?
- Compliance: Are you meeting the regulatory requirements of the different countries you're operating in? Regulation is constantly evolving, and you need to be able to easily and flexibly adapt your KYB process as the rules change. You'll also want an audit trail of the documents you're receiving and the decisions you're granting.
- Coverage: If you’re using a KYB vendor, do they cover all the different countries you're operating in?
- Consistency: Are your processes orderly and efficient? If your team needs to manually review specific cases, it should be clear what steps they need to take. Otherwise, different folks could come up with different results, which can get convoluted and confusing during an audit.
How do you build your ideal Know Your Business process?
Every company’s ideal KYB process may look different, but the process of figuring out how to get there generally involves a few key steps:
- Figure out your business goals and priorities. What do you want out of KYB? Is your biggest priority complying with regulations, deterring fraud, or building trust and safety? Do you care more about conversion or risk management?
- Figure out your needs. What are your compliance needs (if any)? What does your banking partner require? What is necessary to comply with the regulations you need to follow?
- Figure out what you already have. What provider(s) are you currently using? How do they work together? How’s your overall system working? If you’ve already been conducting KYC, what does that process look like? Do you want to implement the same standards for UBOs?
- Build your process. Once you know your goals, current state, needs, and wants, you can begin building a solution you feel good about.
- Analyze and adjust as necessary. It’s important to continually track key metrics so you can iterate and improve on what you’ve built.
What Know Your Business metrics should you care about?
The KYB metrics you should track may vary depending on your needs and what matters to your business. For example, your key metrics may look different if your main priority is deterring fraud instead of converting users. At a high level, you may want to think about:
- User experience, e.g. time to completion for each part of the process
- Automation efficiency, e.g. percentage of verifications you’re able to automatically decide on
- Operational efficiency, e.g. how long it takes analysts to resolve cases that need manual review and how much back and forth there is between internal teams and the business going through the process
- Accuracy, e.g. is your system letting through good users and keeping out fraud? How does the automatic system compare to manual review?
What should you look for in a Know Your Business vendor?
There’s no reason KYB shouldn’t be as seamless as Know Your Customer (KYC), which is the process of verifying individuals you’re interested in or currently working with.
Rather than having to stitch together multiple vendors, you should be able to use one system to manage the entire lifecycle — from collecting and verifying business info to KYC checks on the ultimate beneficial owners (UBOs). Or, if you really want to use multiple data sources and/or vendors, it should allow you to easily integrate with all of them.
Your KYB tool should also be flexible in other ways, allowing you to design and implement a custom process based on your goals, priorities, and changing regulatory needs.
What sets Persona KYB apart?
Persona’s KYB solution is the first in the market to automatically orchestrate the entire KYB process from end to end. With Persona, you get:
A fully customizable collection and verification engine
Use Dynamic Flow to collect information about both the business and its UBOs. Everything is fully customizable and configurable — from the look (font, text, logo, color scheme, size of text, placement of buttons, and more) to what information you want to collect, whether that’s the business’s name, address, and EIN or their estimated revenue and headcount. It’s important to build trust with your customer up front, so we give you all the tools to customize the flow to match your brand.
Once you’ve collected the necessary information, choose how you want to verify the business and UBOs, including (but not limited to):
For businesses:
- Document verifications: Allow users to either take a photo of or upload business documents, such as their business registration certificate. Once they submit, we’ll run verifications in real time, also checking that the document is actually relevant and hasn’t been tampered with.
- TIN verification: Takes the business name and tax ID number and confirms there’s a valid match against the IRS.
- Business lookup report: Takes the business name and address and verifies the business exists in the US.
- Business watchlist report: Screens the business across 1000+ global sanction, warning, and fitness & probity lists.
- Business adverse media report: Screens the business to identify any negative or unfavorable information associated with them.
For individual UBOs:
- Document verifications: Collect any document, such as a government ID or utility bill, and extract the details from the document. We run a number of tampering and fraud checks behind the scenes to make sure it hasn’t been digitally altered.
- Biometric verifications: Ensure an individual’s selfie matches their ID portrait with liveness checks.
- Database verifications: Verify user-submitted information against databases from organizations such as the IRS and DMV to ensure authenticity.
- On-demand reports: Screen the individual against reports such as watchlists and adverse media.
Our automatic risk verification engine also makes it easy to personalize the user experience based on how risky they seem. For example, if businesses with more than one address tend to commit more fraud on your platform, you can automatically send these cases to manual review so your operations and compliance team can take a closer look. On the other hand, you can automatically approve businesses with just one address.
And if a new regulation comes out or you encounter a new type of fraud and need to change your verification flow, no problem — it’s easy to change everything from the type of information you want to collect to the verifications you want to run or how many times the user can attempt verification.
Automation
Rather than someone on your team having to manually collect and verify each UBO’s PII and ID, our system will automatically email each beneficial owner (once they’re identified) to complete the KYC process independently using Persona. This offers a more secure experience and also allows you to conduct KYB and KYC simultaneously, improving conversion and saving time.
Automation also helps reduce back and forth between you and the business you’re verifying. One of the biggest pain points we hear from customers is how if a user submits the wrong document (e.g. it’s for a different business or is the wrong type of document), they have to reach out to the user — whether via email or another communication platform — to ask them to submit the right document. By scanning the document in real time, Persona’s platform can help streamline this process and ask them to submit the correct document while they’re still completing the verification process so you don’t have to.
All the information you need in one place
Our case management tool centralizes all the information you’ve collected into one single view. This is especially handy if you end up needing to perform one-off manual reviews.
Onboard businesses faster with Persona
With Persona, you get an end-to-end streamlined solution that allows you to stitch together business verifications and KYC in one place. Tie in with the rest of your business onboarding process, thanks to integrations with vendors like Salesforce and Hubspot.
Optimize for conversion by streamlining the process for both the end users and yourself — with Persona KYB, you can view multiple disparate pieces of information in a single view, making it easy to decide on whether to approve or decline the business.
Plus, it’s easy to get started quickly — having one system manage the entire process from end-to-end means fewer vendor evaluations, and we’ve seen customers implement Persona’s KYB solution in as little as a day or two. Choose from integration options that range from adding a link to your platform to embedding the experience into your webpage or mobile app.
Ready to automate your KYB process and onboard more businesses? Reach out to your CSM or sign up for a custom demo today.
