UBO verification: How to speed up compliant KYB onboarding
Harry Musson
Verifying ultimate beneficial owners (UBOs) is a critical step in any Know Your Business (KYB) process. For many US compliance teams, it’s still time-consuming, manual and difficult to scale.
As regulatory scrutiny increases under frameworks like FinCEN’s Customer Due Diligence (CDD) Rule and evolving requirements tied to the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA), organizations need a faster, more reliable way to identify and verify beneficial ownership structures.
There is an easier way to perform UBO verification that won’t bog down your onboarding process and turn off potential customers: using a KYB solution that automates multiple onboarding elements, including UBO verification.
However, you’re unsure of how to get started. We’ve written this article to help. We’ll cover:
- How UBO verification works
- 6 strategies to improve your UBO verification process
- How GBG helps businesses perform UBO verification quickly and at scale
Ready to improve your UBO verification process? Learn more about GBG Detected, our end-to-end KYB solution that supports faster, compliant business onboarding for customers around the world. Book a demo.
How UBO verification works
UBO verification helps uncover who ultimately owns or controls a business by verifying the individuals’ identities, screening them for risk, and using the results to make a compliant onboarding decision.
Here is what the process typically looks like:
- You collect company information via manual searches or third-party tools. This usually includes the company’s name, registration number, and official address.
- You identify the UBOs. Using company records, shareholder agreements, and organizational documents, you analyze business ownership and control structure. In the US, anyone who owns 25% of a company or has significant control through voting rights, trust arrangements, or board positions is typically considered a UBO. The percentage may be lower in other countries.
- You verify UBO identity and screen for risk using KYC checks, such as document verification and biometrics, as well as sanctions, PEP, and adverse media lists screening to assess money-laundering or fraud risk.
- You make an informed onboarding decision. Using the results, you can determine whether the business can be onboarded, needs enhanced due diligence, or is too high-risk to onboard. This can be automatic with certain controls and setups in place.
One of the key objectives of UBO verification is to reduce fraud risk. For example, bad actors may manipulate a company to facilitate money laundering or obscure the origins of illicit funds. UBO verification enables you to detect these bad actors and fail them during onboarding.
UBO verification is also a requirement for any company performing KYB checks to comply with anti-money laundering (AML) regulations. Businesses that don’t comply can face penalties.
What is UBO verification?
UBO verification is the process of identifying and confirming the individuals who ultimately own or control a business — typically those with 25% or more ownership, or significant influence over decision-making.
In the US, UBO verification is a core part of KYB and AML compliance, supporting requirements set out by FinCEN and helping organizations:
- Prevent fraud, money laundering and financial crime
- Meet beneficial ownership reporting obligations
- Screen against sanctions lists such as OFAC
- Maintain accurate and auditable ownership records
As ownership structures become more layered and global, manual verification methods are no longer sufficient — driving demand for automated UBO verification solutions.
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. Cut manual KYB checks by 67% with automated UBO discovery
Identifying beneficial owners manually is one of the biggest bottlenecks in KYB onboarding, especially when dealing with complex ownership structures spanning multiple jurisdictions.
Automated UBO verification tools can:
- Aggregate data from 200+ global company registries
- Identify ownership relationships in real time
- Build complete ownership hierarchies in seconds
This significantly reduces the time required to identify ultimate beneficial owners in the US and globally, while improving accuracy and auditability.
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.
To meet FinCEN beneficial ownership requirements, compliance teams need full visibility into ownership chains — not just direct shareholders.
Automated hierarchy-building enables you to:
- Visualize complex ownership networks
- Identify indirect ownership and control
- Maintain audit-ready records for regulators
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
US UBO requirements are evolving, particularly with changes to the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA).
In March 2025, FinCEN introduced an interim final rule that removed certain beneficial ownership reporting requirements for US domestic entities, significantly shifting compliance expectations.
However, financial institutions and regulated businesses are still required to:
- Conduct beneficial ownership verification under the FinCEN CDD Rule
- Maintain accurate ownership records
- Apply risk-based AML controls
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
UBO verification isn’t a one-time task. Ownership structures can change frequently, introducing new compliance risks.
Perpetual monitoring allows you to:
- Detect changes in ownership or control
- Trigger re-verification workflows automatically
- Maintain continuous compliance with AML regulations
This reduces reliance on periodic reviews and helps organizations stay ahead of regulatory expectations. 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.
To scale efficiently, UBO verification should be embedded into your broader KYB onboarding process.
This includes:
- Automated case management workflows
- Integrated identity and business verification
- Real-time decisioning
By connecting UBO verification with your wider compliance stack, you can reduce friction while maintaining strong risk controls.
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.
How we helps businesses perform UBO verification quickly and at scale for faster KYB onboarding
With more than 30 years of experience in the identity verification space, we built our KYB product, GBG Detected, to make KYB as quick and smooth as possible for our 20,000 business customers – without sacrificing compliance.
Our KYB solution replaces scattered systems and connects to authoritative global data so you can easily verify businesses and their UBOs worldwide.
Here are three reasons businesses choose to work with us:
Automate UBO discovery with extensive global data sources
Manual UBO discovery can take days – or longer. We’ve built our GBG Detected platform to reduce this timeframe to seconds.
Once you plug in via a single KYB API, the solution can connect to 600m+ global company registries, 195 beneficial ownership registries, and 2,500+ PEPs, sanctions and adverse media watchlists.
It can also verify identities in 195 countries and automatically pull information like shareholders and ownership percentages, directors and other controlling persons, and parent–subsidiary relationships across borders. It then maps ownership chains to identify the individuals who ultimately own or control the business without manual registry searches.
And with access to GBG Trust, a cross-industry dataset built from billions of identity insights across 28+ sectors, you can make smarter, faster decisions about the trustworthiness of businesses and their UBOs. By drawing on a broad network of contributed data and monitoring millions of transactions and identity data records, the solution detects suspicious behavior in real time, enabling you to act quickly and block fraud attempts.
Minimize customer input with automated data sourcing and targeted UBO tasks to reduce friction and speed up onboarding
Too much friction for the customer during onboarding, such as asking them to complete long forms or upload multiple documents, can cause them to drop off.
With our GBG Detected solution, you can keep customer friction to a minimum by initiating onboarding with just a few basic details like:
- Company name
- Country of registration
- Registration number
The platform also automatically sources and enriches the rest of the business and ownership data from trusted global datasets, such as state registries in the US or Companies House in the UK.
When additional documents are needed, the customer can upload them securely to the platform. You can assign UBOs specific tasks, such as uploading an ID like a passport, so they’re only pulled into the process when necessary.
All of this takes place in a sleek, user-friendly interface that can be white-labeled for higher customer trust.
Leverage configurable workflows to scale KYB more efficiently
Static workflows where each customer is sent through the same onboarding steps can impact your ability to scale, as they add too much friction for low-risk customers and more work for your team.
To minimize manual review volumes and speed up onboarding, set rules within GBG Detected to auto-approve low-risk entities and escalate only high-risk cases for human review. These automated approvals and escalation rules will result in faster pass-through times. By tailoring workflows and risk thresholds, you can ensure the process aligns with your specific compliance needs.
For example, we’re helping Gumtree, one of the UK’s leading online marketplaces, automate the onboarding of Gumtree’s professional services accounts. With GBG Detected, Gumtree is able to enhance the safety of its users by using real-time data to perform KYB and ultimately deliver a faster onboarding experience.
As Joseph Rindsland, Head of Digital Trust & Safety at Gumtree, said: “We chose GBG because we needed a simple, powerful solution to make business onboarding faster and easier for our service providers, whilst ensuring the necessary KYB checks have been completed."
"With its business onboarding solution, GBG Detected, we’re able to automate this process into a single, connected system, eliminating silos and static checks. This helps us onboard and verify service providers faster, while also improving their user experience, supporting our goal to lead in home services category.”
How Weatherbys automated its onboarding process compliantly with GBG Detected
Complex ownership structures and manual processes slowed Weatherbys’ efforts to onboard horse racing syndicates, causing the horse racing conglomerate to seek out a KYB product that could help.
During onboarding, owners were hesitant to share bank statements and other sensitive documents needed for verification via email, which caused friction and delays. Using our GBG Detected solution, the owners were able to securely upload verification documents, balancing regulatory needs with client privacy and convenience.
As a result of working with us, Weatherbys achieved a fully compliant, automated onboarding process tailored to its niche market and the complicated ownership structures of its clients.
Read the full case study: Weatherbys Bank transforms onboarding with GBG Detected
Enable faster, scalable UBO verification with GBG’s automated KYB solution
Improving your UBO verification process requires striking the right balance between strong compliance and a smooth customer experience. This is typically easiest to achieve with an automated solution.
Our GBG Detected platform accelerates UBO verification by replacing manual checks with automated, risk-based identity and screening workflows supported by global data and delivered through a single, unified platform. This enables you to onboard faster and grow without increasing regulatory risk.
Learn how we can help you simplify UBO verification and KYB onboarding with our GBG Detected solution. Request a demo today.
Key criteria to consider when comparing UBO verification solutions include comprehensive global data coverage, automated ownership discovery and verification workflows, easy API integration, and scalability. These support stronger risk assessment and regulatory compliance.
The ideal solution should also screen against relevant watchlists and sanctions lists to reduce exposure to financial crimes like terrorist financing and other illegal activities.
The documents required for UBO checks vary from country to country but generally fall into two categories: identity documents for individuals and ownership documents for the business legal entity.
Identity documents can include a government-issued photo ID, such as a passport or driver’s license, and something that provides proof of address like a utility bill or bank statement. Commonly accepted ownership documents include a shareholder register, articles of incorporation, and records showing shareholding or an ownership stake.
In most jurisdictions, a person who owns or controls 25% percent or more of a company qualifies as an ultimate beneficial owner. However, the percentage can be lower in certain regions like South Africa or Colombia, where it’s 5%.
The information needed to determine exact ownership percentages isn’t always easy to access, but with a solution like GBG Detected, the information is gathered for you and individuals exceeding regulatory thresholds are flagged automatically.
Manually piecing together multi-layered entities by parsing through business documents and company registries can be a complex process that requires a significant amount of time. Using KYB solutions like GBG Detected that automatically trace multi-layer ownership, calculate ownership thresholds, and surface ultimate beneficiaries can streamline these customer due diligence (CDD) processes.
The 25% ownership threshold is a common standard used in UBO verification. In many jurisdictions, any individual who directly or indirectly owns 25% or more of a company's shares, voting rights, or ownership interests must be identified and verified as an ultimate beneficial owner. Individuals with significant control may also need to be identified, even if they own less than 25%.
Automated UBO verification can often be completed within minutes, depending on the complexity of the ownership structure and the availability of company data. By automating ownership discovery, risk screening, and beneficial ownership analysis, organisations can accelerate KYB onboarding, reduce manual reviews, and improve compliance efficiency.
Perpetual UBO monitoring is the continuous monitoring of ultimate beneficial owners, ownership structures, sanctions exposure, adverse media, and other risk indicators. Unlike periodic reviews, ongoing monitoring helps organisations detect ownership changes quickly, maintain compliance, and respond to emerging risks throughout the customer lifecycle.
UBO verification is a critical part of Know Your Business (KYB) compliance. It helps organisations identify the individuals who ultimately own or control a business, uncover hidden ownership structures, reduce fraud risk, and meet anti-money laundering (AML) and regulatory requirements. Effective UBO verification supports safer and more efficient business onboarding.