Best KYC and KYB software tools in 2025: A practitioner’s guide

Know Your Customer (KYC) and Know Your Business (KYB) sit at the heart of modern financial crime prevention.

• Done well: they speed up onboarding, protect your brand, and keep regulators confident.
• Done poorly: they create backlogs, friction, and blind spots.
  

This guide distills a practitioner’s view of KYC/KYB, based on a conversation with Martin Walker (PA Consulting) in our podcast The Laundry.

You’ll learn:

• What “good” looks like.
• How leading teams are modernizing.
• Where the traps are.
• A pragmatic vendor landscape and a ready-to-use FAQ at the end.

What is the difference between KYC and KYB?

KYC

• Verifies people (customers, individuals)
• Identity checks
• Sanctions / PEP / adverse media screening
• Risk scoring
• Moving from one-off checks to perpetual monitoring (pKYC)
• Unlike periodic reviews (e.g., every 1–3 years), pKYC updates risk profiles continuously based on new signals.
  

KYB

• Verifies companies (entities, businesses)
• Legal existence & registration
• Ultimate Beneficial Owners (UBOs) & controlling parties
• Sanctions / PEP / adverse media screening
• Risk scoring
• Moving from one-off checks to perpetual monitoring (pKYB)
• pKYB means company profiles are automatically refreshed when ownership, jurisdiction, or sanction status changes.
  

Both KYC and KYB are moving from point-in-time checks to event-driven, perpetual monitoring across the customer lifecycle.

Why risk-based KYC/KYB matters

A risk-based approach (RBA) means calibrating effort to actual risk, rather than treating all customers the same.

• Define “good enough”: policies, standards, and playbooks that translate to the front line.
• Use data smartly: combine internal activity with external sources.
• Automate the routine: let analysts focus on exceptions and high-risk cases.
  

Benefits

• Customer experience: lighter touch for low-risk customers means fewer drop-offs.
• Operational efficiency: avoid drowning in manual reviews and alerts.
• Brand & ESG: doing business with the right customers protects reputation and reduces board-level risk.

“We don’t know the criminals as well as we should; we’re always lagging behind. A checkbox mentality doesn’t cover the risk-based approach that the regulators emphasise,” notes an expert in Strise’s AML Megaminds Report

What “good” looks like in KYC/KYB

1. Start with standards, not tools

Before buying technology:

• Define required data points (per entity type).
• Set verification rules (what, how, when).
• Map the full lifecycle: onboarding, due diligence, monitoring, offboarding.
  

Without this, technology amplifies chaos.

2. Map reality, then break into phases

Diagnose first:

• Policies & procedures: where are the gaps?
• Customer data health: what’s missing?
• Process gaps: onboarding, periodic reviews, offboarding.
  

Then prioritize manageable phases (e.g., fix the data you collect when a customer first signs up, remediate high-risk segments, automate monitoring).

3. Build for perpetual KYC/KYB

Perpetual KYC/KYB means your system ingests changes (e.g., new UBO, sanctions event, registered address shift) and interprets:

• Non-material change means log, no action.
• Material change means auto-trigger review, request info, or escalate.
  

Requires:

• Signal detection (internal + external data).
• Central risk model (consistent interpretation).
• Automation (pre-filled outreach, audit trails).
  

4. Solve the hard part: data

Even in transparent jurisdictions:

• Registries differ in coverage, format, freshness, and access.
• Businesses must standardize postcodes, company numbers, names, addresses, ownership models.
  

Expect:

• Many integrations with edge cases.
• Long tail of rules (the last 20% is hardest).
• AI is powerful, but still depends on trusted reference data.

In our Laundry podcast episode, Martin Walker emphasised:

“The quality of the data is the single biggest challenge financial institutions have in making sense of their customers.” Martin Walker

5. Orchestrate the humans

• First line wants growth.
• Second line wants control.
• IT is attached to legacy systems.
  

Treat change management as a first-class workstream: clear governance, incentives, and communication.

How mature teams keep improving

Two axes of improvement:

• Effectiveness: catching the right risk earlier.
• Efficiency: less effort to get there.
  

How leaders improve:

• Better data fusion (registries + ownership + activity + media).
• Clearer explainability (why risk changed, what was done).
• Removing copy-paste work between disconnected tools.

Top KYC/KYB vendors (2025 snapshot)

Note: The following overview of top KYC/KYB tools is for context only. It is not endorsed by Martin Walker.

Data providers

• Sayari – commercial risk intelligence, ownership and trade mapping.
• Kyckr – direct-from-registry company data.
• LexisNexis – sanctions, PEPs, adverse media, historical data.
• Dow Jones Risk & Compliance – sanctions/PEP/adverse media datasets.
• Refinitiv (LSEG World-Check) – industry-standard sanctions/PEP/adverse media dataset.
  

AI platforms

• Strise – AML automation that runs on trusted data. Used by leading enterprises such as PwC and Corpay.
• Lucinity – AI-powered case management with behavior analytics.
• Spektr – modular compliance agents and no-code workflows.
• Greenlite AI – AI agents for screening, due diligence, and monitoring.
• Bits Technology – compliance orchestration, no-code workflow builder.
• Duna – AML/KYC/KYB platform with daily screening.
  

Case management and lifecycle

• Fenergo – enterprise CLM, onboarding through reviews.
• WorkFusion – AI workflow automation for compliance tasks.
• Napier – modular AML suite (screening, monitoring, risk scoring).
• SmartSearch – UK-based AML/KYC/KYB provider.
• Salv – orchestration and institution-to-institution intelligence sharing.
• Sumsub – global ID & business verification, AML screening.