Know Your Business (KYB) Requests

Know Your Business (KYB) is a process financial institutions use to verify a company’s identity and assess any potential risks before moving money on its behalf. In this case, that means confirming your business details before processing payroll. It’s similar to the Know Your Customer (KYC) process, which verifies individual identities.

KYB involves collecting and verifying information about a business, including its legal structure, ownership, financial stability, and business activities. The aim is to understand the nature of the business, its potential risks, and its compliance with relevant laws and regulations.

The information typically collected during KYB includes:

  1. Business Registration: Verifying the legal status and registration details of the business, including its name, registration number, and physical address.

  2. Ownership Information: Identifying and verifying the individuals or entities that own or control the business, including beneficial owners.

  3. Business Activities: Understanding the nature of the business, its industry, and the products or services it offers.

  4. Compliance Checks: Ensuring that the business complies with relevant legal and regulatory requirements, such as anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorism financing (CTF) regulations.

KYB is crucial for risk management and regulatory compliance. It helps us assess the potential risk associated with doing business with a particular entity, prevent fraud, and comply with laws related to due diligence and customer identification.

In most cases, compliance checks on your business can be completed using only the information provided during your HHAeXchange Payroll onboarding. We complete tasks such as running the business name and federal employment identification number into our database to see if they match. We verify the business address is a real location and match it to the company’s incorporation documents. We may also run checks on the business owner. Typically this all happens behind the scenes. In some cases we are not able to complete our screening and need additional information. If this happens we’ll reach out to request additional information about the employer (for example, a copy of a legal document). This is called an RFI, or request for information.