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?

Know Your Customer (KYC) and Know Your Business (KYB) tools are automated compliance solutions that verify the identity of individuals and companies. These systems collect and analyze data from trusted sources—like government registries, credit databases, and sanctions lists—to confirm who a customer or business really is. By using KYC and KYB software, financial institutions detect fraud faster, reduce onboarding friction, and meet global AML regulations efficiently.

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

• iDenfy - leading all-in-one identity verification platform that offers KYC/KYB/AML compliance solutions.‍
• 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.