Announcement

Onboard businesses globally with Persona's international KYB solution

Streamline global business onboarding with Persona's international KYB solution, ensuring compliance and a seamless experience across borders.

Map of Europe with boxes overlaid describing the know your business process of verifying beneficial owners, watchlist screening, verifications, and business location
Last updated:
10/18/2024
Read time:
Share this post
Copied
Table of contents
⚡ Key takeaways
  • Each geography has its own identity nuances — whether it’s what data is actually available for verification, what end users want to present at onboarding, or the compliance laws at stake. 
  • With Persona, you can solve for global business verification and define your ideal KYB process while maintaining localized experiences.

During international work trips, I often found myself opening up my favorite food delivery app and ordering a local meal between meetings. Enjoying something unique to where I was, with the ease of using the same service I did back home, is routine as an end-user and appreciated as a weary traveler. But, this seamlessness belied all the effort it took this company, and all global businesses, to enable this. 

Now, as Persona’s Know Your Business (KYB) product lead, I marvel at all that was invisible to me when I eagerly scrolled through my lunch options: from rethinking the onboarding flow a customer is greeted with to the local compliance checks a risk team has to complete on a new merchant. Nothing is simply copied and pasted when you’re expanding globally.

Each geography has its own identity nuances — whether it’s what data is actually available for verification, what end users want to present at onboarding, or the compliance laws at stake.  

Ignore those nuances, and you deliver a poor, one-size-fits-all user experience. Take it to the extreme, and you wind up with a disjointed product stack siloed by geo or use case. 

Our customers, such as Etsy, LinkedIn, and Travelex know this, and trust our unified platform to verify individuals and businesses globally, while maintaining localized trust and compliance.

And since the launch of our initial KYB solution, we’ve heard a clear ask from customers wanting to apply our automated approach to business verification globally. Our mandate has been clear since: to enable international KYB with the nuance, automation, and consolidation customers expect from global Know Your Customer (KYC)

What is global KYB onboarding?

KYB onboarding is a due diligence process that a company undertakes to verify the legitimacy of any businesses it engages with before they are onboarded. It’s an essential piece of global anti-money laundering (AML) compliance and is a core component of compliance with marketplace-focused regulations such as the INFORM Consumers Act and Europe's DAC7 directive

The goal of KYB is two-fold. First, KYB helps to determine whether or not the business you want to work with is actually real — vs. a shell company or other illegal corporation — and that it is safe for you to do business with from a compliance, legal, and risk perspective. Second, the KYB process helps businesses ascertain whether the beneficial owners are real people and safe to do business with. 

Global KYB onboarding applies these processes to international markets. If your company engages with businesses in multiple geographies — whether as customers, vendors, partners, etc. — it’s crucial that your KYB process be tailored to the laws, regulations, and other nuances associated with those geographies. 

Introducing our new international KYB solution

Today, we’re launching the latest evolution of our solution, enabling you to solve for global business verification while maintaining localized experiences within the same platform. Just define your ideal KYB process — Persona manages the minutiae, whether it’s connecting to international data sources, automating KYB-KYC workflows, or helping you meet compliance. 

Persona gives us the power to look at every property and centralize everything. There’s no need for spreadsheets or looking at other screens or going to other locations — everything’s in one place.
Dave Barrett
Risk and Compliance Manager, WeTravel


Let’s dig into why it’s so exciting and how customers like WeTravel and Discogs are using it to onboard businesses globally. 

Connect to 150+ business verification data sources for higher coverage

The starting point of any KYB process is business verification, which used to mean finding, connecting with, and searching against local registries to decide if the entity in question was legitimate. Multiply that by the different countries you would want to operate in, and verifying businesses internationally was painful at best, and unscalable at worst. 

With the latest evolution of our KYB solution, companies can verify businesses around the world, from Europe and North America to Asia and Latin America, via a single integration. Our solution connects to 150+ data sources, meaning less time connecting and integrating with individual business registries, and more time actually onboarding businesses. By searching against these issuing business registries, you can go to the source of truth to decide whether a business is legitimate and also capture newly incorporated businesses.

But verifying a business accurately actually requires two things: connections to issuing data sources and localized matching. For instance, Brussel and Bruxelles are actually the same city within Belgium, but without that context, it would be easy to reject a business that lists Brussel as their home city if you were purely going off what is listed in the Banque-Carrefour des Entreprises, Belgium’s official business registry. 

Onboard more businesses with more accuracy via Contextual Matching

This “lost in translation” dynamic is one of the chief contributors to wrong decisions made during the business verification process. As a result, we’re excited to introduce Persona Contextual Matching, a matching engine designed to help companies decide if a business is legitimate, with more accuracy and control.

Contextual Matching, which is powered by proprietary search algorithms and AI, enables teams to balance conversion with compliance during the business verification process. For example, if you’re a fintech company, you may want to use a more granular matching framework approved by your compliance team when onboarding businesses for a new credit product. For products geared toward lower-risk populations where conversion is important, AI-powered matching can be more appropriate since it mimics the holistic approach of a human reviewer.

Rather than having to choose between matching frameworks, Contextual Matching enables you to automatically deploy what makes the most sense, depending on the input, end-user, or the needs of your internal compliance team. 

By default, Contextual Matching comes preloaded with continuously updated insights gathered from extensive testing against businesses for any given region. This means the latest observed and confirmed nuances of each country, from the format of their business number to how their addresses are structured, are reflected in the way Persona decides to verify a business.

In our early tests, we saw Contextual Matching improve match rates for legitimate businesses by up to 55% compared to standard matching frameworks used by other KYB providers. As of today, Contextual Matching is available for 30+ countries, including the UK, Canada, China, Australia, and all of the European Union with early access available for countries in Asia Pacific, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa.

Seamless, automated KYB-KYC for your users, wherever they are

While important, the business verification process is only one part of a larger KYB-KYC journey. Equally critical is localizing the experience because what good is being able to verify a Chinese business if they can’t understand your flow or drop off due to a long wait time? 

That’s why our global capabilities are integrated into our pre-existing KYB–KYC solution. Your product and risk teams can retain the benefit of being able to build and deploy integrated KYB-KYC flows, while your end-users receive localized, seamless experiences. 

For example, you can dynamically change flow logic, like what business document is requested, based on real-time signals like device location or IP address.  Knowing that documents like Articles of Incorporation are a key part of verifying a business, our solution supports the collection, classification, and extraction of global business documents, so end-users can submit relevant documents during their initial onboarding. 

This seamlessness also extends to the back-end experience for your compliance or operation team. Rather than navigating different tools or setting up a lengthy manual review process, you can build automated workflows that span specific countries or user segments. If a business from a high-risk country fails initial verification, you can initiate global watchlist screenings and automatically incorporate those results into a manual review case for additional review.

Flexibility is key for us. We can start with low friction, and if we see bad actors are still being let through, we can ask for more information or run additional verifications. With Persona, we can turn those dials of friction up and down without having to redeploy our flows.
Brandon Otto
Product Manager, Discogs

Adapt quickly to regional regulations like DAC7 with Persona’s flexible platform 

On top of serving end-users and internal teams, going global means meeting new compliance requirements. For instance, in the last year alone, the INFORM Act in the US and DAC7 in the EU came into effect, requiring e-commerce marketplaces operating globally to comply with these new regulations on top of meeting pre-existing GDPR and CCPA requirements. 

This pattern of patchwork, ever-evolving requirements is a perpetual pain point for any compliance team serving a global company. But at the same time, these teams shouldn’t have to reinvent their identity processes each time their business wants to expand to a new region or a new law is introduced.

With this in mind, we’ve designed our KYB solution to be highly comprehensive and customizable — so risk and compliance teams can build the required workflows or meet regulatory changes for all the jurisdictions they operate in a single platform. As a result, companies can meet compliance requirements like DAC7, DSA, and FINTRAC faster. 

With full access to Persona’s suite of Verification and Reports, you can incorporate additional risk signals or requirements during business and beneficial owner verification, with a simple workflow update. From verifying an EU VAT number for DAC7 compliance to screening for a specific industry at onboarding, you can dynamically adjust what you verify, from whom, within one interface. The results from any of these verifications can even be stored in the EU to respect local data preferences or redacted via flexible Workflows to meet GDPR compliance. 

For example, the compliance team at a leading e-commerce marketplace quickly builds and iterates new business onboarding flows, depending on the local requirements they may be trying to meet in the EU and North America. Persona also acts as a centralized repository across all of those use cases, with secure PII storage and a robust audit trail automatically generated.

Based on our experience working with customers like these, Persona also now offers purpose-built solutions for key compliance measures like DAC7 and INFORM. These out-of-the-box configurations mean you can get compliant in days rather than months. 

Go global with Persona for KYB onboarding

With our new global KYB solutions, it’s never been easier to build your ideal KYB process and solve for global business verification. 

Going global no longer means splicing together different data sources or scrambling to meet the needs of a new market. With the right tools, you can focus on actually serving your customers, rather than struggling to verify them — all while unifying your identity processes, meeting compliance needs, and serving truly localized onboarding experiences. 

This is only possible with a KYB platform that considers the entirety of the KYB-KYC process and the specific products or capabilities required by each type of customer or end user. 

It’s been amazing to collaborate with our customers to bring our vision to life and offer a global KYB solution with equal parts breadth and depth. We look forward to seeing how our customers put our platform to work in every market we serve, whether it’s Europe, North America, the Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific, or Latin America.

On-demand webinar
Learn how to avoid common international KYB pitfalls

If you’re interested in streamlining your KYB-KYC processes globally and want to learn how Persona can help, reach out to your CSM or request a custom demo to see how our international KYB solution works. 

Published on:
2/29/2024

Frequently asked questions

No items found.

Continue reading

Continue reading

Persona ranked 1st across all evaluated Use Cases in 2024 Gartner® Critical Capabilities report, positioned highest for Ability to Execute in inaugural Magic Quadrant™ for Identity Verification
Persona ranked 1st across all evaluated Use Cases in 2024 Gartner® Critical Capabilities report, positioned highest for Ability to Execute in inaugural Magic Quadrant™ for Identity Verification
Announcement

Persona ranked 1st across all evaluated Use Cases in 2024 Gartner® Critical Capabilities report, positioned highest for Ability to Execute in inaugural Magic Quadrant™ for Identity Verification

See how Persona was evaluated in the inaugural Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Identity Verification and Critical Capabilities report, and learn more about our configurable approach to identity.

Workforce security redefined: Persona and Okta partner to verify identities and protect against phishing and deepfakes
Workforce security redefined: Persona and Okta partner to verify identities and protect against phishing and deepfakes
Announcement

Workforce security redefined: Persona and Okta partner to verify identities and protect against phishing and deepfakes

Enforce identity verification throughout the employee life cycle using Persona and Okta’s out-of-the-box integration for identity verification.

Build bespoke age verification with Persona
Build bespoke age verification with Persona
Announcement

Build bespoke age verification with Persona

When thinking about age verification, balancing regulations and privacy can seem overwhelming. That’s why we offer a configurable age verification solution built to serve the needs of your business.

International KYB: Everything global businesses need to know
Industry

International KYB: Everything global businesses need to know

Learn what Know Your Business is, the unique challenges of addressing it on a global scale, and some of the laws governing KYB requirements around the world.

What does the Know Your Business (KYB) process look like?
Industry

What does the Know Your Business (KYB) process look like?

Learn how businesses usually conduct KYB, why the process is often challenging, and more.

Global AML compliance: Is your business doing enough?
Industry

Global AML compliance: Is your business doing enough?

Discover some of the regulations and protocols you’ll need to know and remember when conducting business internationally

Ready to get started?

Get in touch or start exploring Persona today.