Know Your Business (KYB) verification for Canadian firms

Know Your Business, or KYB, is the process of verifying a corporate customer: the entity itself, the people who own and control it, and the risk the whole structure presents. For Canadian reporting entities onboarding businesses, including PSPs verifying merchants and platforms verifying sellers, KYB is where onboarding gets complicated, and where examiners find gaps.

Verify the entity

The first step is confirming the business exists and is what it claims to be: legal name, registration, status, and address, checked against reliable sources. A company that cannot be confirmed, or whose details do not reconcile, is the first warning sign and has to be recorded as such.

Find and verify the beneficial owners

The harder step is identifying the beneficial owners, the humans who ultimately own or control the company, and verifying them as individuals. Layered ownership, holding companies, and trusts are exactly where illicit structures hide, so the work has to trace control through the layers, not stop at the first corporate name. Each identified individual is then verified using an accepted FINTRAC identity verification method, the same way a retail customer would be.

The material discrepancy report

Where the beneficial ownership information a firm collects conflicts with the federal beneficial ownership registry, the PCMLTFA can require a material discrepancy report. This is a relatively new obligation and a common blind spot. BriteBase builds the discrepancy check into the KYB workflow so it is not missed. The detail is in the material discrepancy report guide.

Screen the whole structure

The entity and its principals are screened against sanctions, PEP, and adverse-media lists through screening, at onboarding and on an ongoing basis. A clean individual owner attached to a sanctioned entity, or the reverse, is precisely what structure-level screening is there to catch.

One connected record

KYB produces a lot of moving parts: the entity, the ownership chart, the verified individuals, and the screening results. BriteBase captures them as one connected, examiner-ready file, and runs the customer due diligence workflow that turns the facts into a defensible decision, described on the customer due diligence solution page. For where KYB bites hardest, the PSP primer covers merchant onboarding at scale.

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