UBO verification: Best practices for faster, compliant KYB onboarding

Six strategies to improve your UBO verification process

The risk with UBO verification is that it takes up a lot of time and resources. This complexity eventually leads to customer drop-offs. If you’re emailing back and forth with business customers to obtain documents and manually verifying them with fragmented data sources, there’s a risk they’ll give up and go elsewhere. 

Here are several ways you can improve your UBO verification process:

1. Connect to global data sources to find UBO data automatically

Manually identifying UBOs by performing online searches or looking through documents is a time-consuming and resource-heavy task. What’s more, the collected data often ends up fragmented across inboxes and spreadsheets, making the process even harder to manage.

Modern UBO verification solutions automatically pull ownership data from authoritative sources, such as official company registries and credit agencies, and store it in a single, centralized view. This removes manual effort and gives your team faster, more reliable access to the information you need.

Here’s how it works in GBG Detected, our all-in-one KYB solution: the platform automatically identifies potential UBOs from trusted data sources and presents them to the customer for confirmation. This reduces the number of steps both customers and your teams must complete – all while increasing confidence in the accuracy of the data. GBG Detected can cut manual KYB checks up to 67%, reducing low-risk customer case management and costs.

2. Use an auto-build hierarchy for a comprehensive overview of the company’s structure

Some companies have got multiple layers of ownership: a company can be owned by another company, which is owned by yet another company, with the UBO at the top of the pyramid.

But this information isn’t always publicly available – and when it is, it may be difficult to find and piece together, taking up days of your teams’ time.

One way to simplify this complex task is to use an auto-build hierarchy tool, which automatically creates diagrams illustrating all the relevant companies and UBOs in an ownership structure for a more comprehensive overview. 

This is how it looks in GBG Detected:

3. Invite UBOs into your onboarding journey to get the information you need

UBOs are often far removed from a business’s daily operations, so getting hold of them can be challenging. As such, you’ll likely be communicating with a middle manager during onboarding rather than the UBOs themselves.

However, there will be tasks that UBOs need to complete, such as providing the necessary documents for verification. Instead of a prolonged back-and-forth over emails, your onboarding contact should be able to invite the relevant persons to complete such tasks in an onboarding portal.

This helps provide a faster, lower-friction way to complete your due diligence.

4. Automatically find the ownership percentage for each UBO

Knowing exact ownership percentages allows you to request documentation only from relevant individuals and avoid unnecessary verification of non-qualifying shareholders. But determining these percentages isn’t always easy, especially when the relevant information isn’t readily available.

This is another area where automated KYB solutions can help: by automatically determining ownership percentages and flagging those above regulatory thresholds, you can quickly see how ownership is distributed across individuals and entities within a company and focus your verification efforts on the right people.

5. Perform ongoing monitoring with real-time alerts and periodic re-screening

To stay compliant after onboarding, you need a way to continuously monitor UBOs for changes that could increase risk. This includes tracking whether a UBO is added to a sanctions or PEP list, is featured negatively in the news, or if the company itself undergoes a material change, such as insolvency or a shift in financial status. 

Without automation, detecting these changes typically requires repeated manual searches, which takes time and may result in incomplete information.

An effective UBO verification process enables you to monitor these risk signals automatically and surface relevant changes as they occur. Real-time alerts allow your team to act quickly when new risks emerge, while periodic re-screening ensures UBO information remains up to date over time. By tailoring review frequency based on customer risk profiles, you can focus resources where they matter most.

6. Use an end-to-end KYB solution to centralize your operations in one place

UBO verification is just one part of KYB, alongside confirming business details like registration and licensing status and performing ongoing monitoring. Having all these elements fragmented across different systems and tools, however, can lead to compliance gaps because manually moving data between silos increases the risk for human error. 

When everything lives in one end-to-end KYB platform, on the other hand, information like company registry data, ownership structures, and director information can be sourced once and reused. With GBG Detected’s automated Know Your Business intelligence, you can reduce onboarding time by more than 75%.

Identified UBOs can also automatically flow into individual KYC and screening checks without manual hand-offs between systems. What’s more, compliance reporting is made easier because each business (and its UBOs) is presented as a complete file with all checks, comments, and decisions together in one place.