Business verification and Know Your Business (KYB) processes help businesses prevent fraud, comply with U.S. regulations, and reduce financial crime risk on their platforms. From banks to lenders to fintechs to marketplaces, businesses need a robust, compliant, and risk-based business verification process.

But that’s easier said than done when the regulations come from a combination of many financial regulatory bodies, different industries have different rules, companies are allowed to set their own risk thresholds, and there’s no source of information or central checklist of exactly what you need to do.

We’ve catalogued a central repository of critical business verification information in this list of over 40+ resources, covering everything from the early stages of building out your process, to how to search different data sources for the information you need, to where the mistakes you’re making are allowing fraud or costing you money—and everything in between.

Let’s begin with resources that cover the basics of business verification at a higher level:

This collection of 101-style intros and ultimate guides cover the basics of building out your business verification and KYB (Know Your Business) processes. Unlike Know Your Customer (KYC), business verification and KYB focus on the process of onboarding businesses in the financial world, not individual customers, which means it comes with its own set of unique challenges.

The necessity to build out a business verification process comes from key U.S. regulations including the Bank Secrecy Act 1970, and the “Know Your Customer Rule”, all of which are built out a combination of the USA PATRIOT ACT, FINRA rules, SEC regulations—clearly there’s a lot you need to be aware of.

Whether you’re a fintech bank doing commercial account onboarding, or assessing risks of small business lending, these guides will get you started:

1. Know Your Business (KYB) verification 101: Get started

Explains the fundamentals of Know Your Business (KYB), why verifying businesses is essential for preventing fraud and ensuring compliance, and outlines the core components of a business verification process. Breaks the process into clear, actionable steps—like collecting key business information and cross-checking it against official records—so companies can build a reliable and scalable KYB workflow from the ground up.

2. The Ultimate Guide to Business Verification for KYB

Covers what business verification is, why it’s critical for onboarding and maintaining business relationships, and how organizations validate that a company is legitimate and accurately represented. Learn more about the core purpose and goals of your business verification process.

3. The CIP, CDD, & EDD: The Core Elements of KYC/KYB

Customer Identification Programs (CIP), Customer Due Diligence (CDD), and Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD) all work together as key components of KYC and KYB frameworks to verify identities and assess risk in financial relationships. From initial identity verification to deeper risk analysis, learn how to build a layered, compliant approach to onboarding and monitoring business customers using all of these tactics as part of your process

4. The 6 Core CIP Requirements: How to Follow Them

A deep dive into Customer Identification Programs (CIPs), why they are required under U.S. regulations, and the six core processes financial institutions must follow to verify customer identities and reduce fraud risk. Covers specifically how to document the process, and what type of information  you need to collect from your customers.

5. Navigating the AML Act of 2020 & New CFT Regulations

We break down the key provisions of the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020, what the AML & CFT regulations are under this Act, and how your financial institution can adapt to the changes, and implications of this regulation.

When you begin building out the ‘how’ of your business verification process to check whether a business is legitimate, you need to find reliable, compliant data pipelines, a way to search the databases of every state at once rather than manually for each customer you onboard, and both authoritative and alternative KYB data to assess businesses based on more than just verifying their EIN.

The varying sources of business verification data and places to search for information that can actually verify businesses to a compliant standard is one of the hardest parts of building out your business verification process, because the data pipeline is the bedrock on which the rest of the process is built.

Learn more about how to search for the business verification information you need, and where to get the data:

6. EIN Search: How To + Top EIN lookup providers

How an EIN search uses authoritative business data—like IRS records and government databases—to confirm a company’s identity, legitimacy, and legal status during onboarding. Learn how to collect and cross-check EIN data across multiple reliable sources, forming a data-driven way to validate entities and flag risk early in the onboarding process.

7. How To Do a Business Registration Lookup: 3 Methods

Covers the 3 methods you can use to do a business registration lookup: a manual and individual search of the State Secretary of State (SOS) offices, using the SEC’s EDGAR system, or using an automated SOS business search software like Middesk.

8. How to Find Articles of Incorporation for Business Verification

Learn why these documents are critical for verifying a company’s legal existence and legitimacy, as well as how to find them. You can cross-check business names, addresses, and ownership details against what a business provides to confirm accuracy and flag potential risk early.

9. How To Find Out Who Owns a Business for Compliance

How to identify a business’s owners using data from government registries, public records, and specialized databases to uncover Ultimate Beneficial Ownership (UBOs) and meet KYB compliance requirements.

10. How To Check if a Business is in Good Standing & Compliant

Learn how to determine whether a business is in “good standing” by using authoritative data sources including SOS records, tax filings, and public risk signals to confirm that a company is properly registered, compliant, and legally able to operate.

Most business verification teams do their best to avoid the costs of fraud, but one of the biggest hidden threats to your business is how much manual business identity verification is actually costing you, both in terms of the internal resources it hoards, as well as the mistakes that come out of it.

These are resources that teach you how to better automate your client onboarding process, while still maintaining an end-to-end process that includes perpetual KYB.

11. How to Automate KYB Verification for Companies

KYB is automated through 3 key elements: rule-based decisioning, big data analytics, and AI. Explore how those fit into your process, and take 5 actionable steps to get it done internally.

12. How Modern KYB Balances Security and Customer Satisfaction in Business Onboarding

This ebook provides a friction audit of your onboarding process: where most KYB workflows are losing trust, how to prefill, enrich, and auto-verify without increasing risk, and how adaptive KYB workflows can change when real-time risk signals come into play.

13. Real-Time Compliance Monitoring & How to Implement It

Adding ongoing compliance capabilities helps you identify when the status of a business you’ve onboarded changes—like if they file for bankruptcy, have a lien filed against them, or change their EIN. This guide explains how you can set ongoing compliance up in your KYB program.

14. How To Automate the Customer Due Diligence (CDD) Process

Explore how you can use CDD automation that actually speeds up KYB due diligence procedures. You can onboard businesses faster and more effectively—without adding extra risks to your platform.

15. Balancing Customer Experience with Safer Business Onboarding

This webinar takes a deeper look into the “consumerization” of the business customer experience, teaching you how to maintain trust and compliance from the very first interaction with your customers.

Keeping the biggest threats of your platform is a core component of your business verification process. Adhering to U.S. regulations to ensure you don’t work with prohibited businesses is achieved with things like NAICS Code Lookups or SIC Code Lookups, as well as ensuring you are following best practices for watchlist screening—because it is not a ‘one and done’ type of task.

Here are resources that help with prohibited business screening:

16. How To Run an OFAC check + 5 OFAC API Tools to Automate It

We cover everything key here: the purpose of OFAC checks, how to run them compliantly, how to automate OFAC screening, and how to conduct OFAC checks quickly and effortlessly.

17. Prohibited Businesses: How To Ensure You Don’t Work with Them

Understand the reasons you are compelled by that prohibit business with certain companies, the 9 most common types of prohibited business, and how to check and screen for these businesses to keep them off of your platform.

18. How To Perform a PEP Risk Assessment for KYB

Learn how to develop a PEP (Politically Exposed Persons) risk assessment framework that fits in your business verification process, as well as how to automate PEP screening and other CDD processes.

19. How to Maintain RCA Compliance in AML & Banking

It’s not just PEPs, but RCAs (Relatives & Close Associates) you also need to screen for. This guide shows you how to do that compliantly per U.S. regulations, and how to maintain that compliance as you continue to work with businesses when UBOs and associates change over time.

20. How to Conduct Adverse Media Screening for KYB

Adverse Media Screening is another key component of a robust process, as it finds key risk indicators that authoritative sources like Secretary of State databases don’t offer. Learn how to use alternative data to screen for additional risks.

21. Leveraging Web Presence Data in the Business Customer Lifecycle

In this webinar, learn how to use web presence data as an alternative to your authoritative business verification data. We also explain where to get it, and where in your customer lifecycle you need to be looking at it.

The reputational damage and monetary risk of getting business verification is the highest-stakes aspect of building your KYB program, but balancing friction and fraud in the business onboarding process is one of the most challenging things for companies to navigate because you don’t want to make things so difficult that your customers churn, but you also don’t want fraud on your platform.

These resources teach you how to strike that balance:

22. How To Stop Synthetic Identity Fraud & Theft as a Business

Review 7 synthetic identity theft example scams to look out for, learning how to detect and prevent synthetic business identity theft from getting on your platform in the process.

23. How to Combat Merchant Fraud & Maintain Platform Integrity

There are 8 different types of merchant fraud you need to be able to understand, identify, and keep off of your platform. We show you how to detect and monitor it, as well as how to automate merchant fraud prevention.

24. How to Avoid Onboarding Victims of Business Identity Theft

We explain how to do this showing 9 examples of business identity theft scams and tactics, and share 8 strategies for preventing the onboarding of fake businesses that have stolen business identities.

25. How Fraudsters Use AI-Powered Fraud for KYB/KYC Bypass

Learn how AI-enabled fraud works, what the new tools and new threats are, and how to modernize your KYB process in this era to fight back against AI-powered fraud.

26. Shelf Companies: A Blind Spot in Fraud Detection

This webinar will show you exactly how fraudsters exploit reactivated businesses, and the post-onboarding signals that more quickly and reliably show you how to detect shelf company abuse.

Determining your risk threshold, scoring the risks of customers that come in, and deciding how to make decisions when looking at thin file businesses or when your customer has a lien against their business is the most flexible part of your process, but also one of the most important.

These resources will teach you how to build automated risk scoring into your KYB program, so you can turn verification into velocity:

27. How To Set Up UCC Lien Monitoring & Top Tools To Do It

This contains a step-by-step guide for how to set up UCC lien monitoring in your KYB process, 3 best practices for monitoring liens in a risk-based KYB program, and the top 4 UCC lien monitoring services & tools you can utilize to do it.

28. Address Risk Insights

In this webinar, you’ll learn how to uncover the hidden risks that lie within customer addresses, and power up your compliance workflow based on these top of funnel risk indicators.

29. Where To Get Lien Data Report Information for Businesses

Learn what’s included in a lien data report, and how and where to get one that can power your business verification process. 

30. Your Business Customers Changed Last Quarter. Did You Know?

Your business customers changed after onboarding. Are you doing enough to detect those changes and remain compliant? This guide explains why ‘point-in-time KYB’ isn't enough, and what ongoing monitoring should look like.

31. Small Business Verification: Automate Onboarding & Reduce Risk

Small businesses are some of the hardest to get quality data on, or build risk thresholds around. This guide for lenders helps you find that better data, and power up your small business lending.

32. Using Alternative Credit Data for Better Lending Decisions

Learn what kind of alternative sources of data lenders can use in addition to traditional authoritative data. We show you how to use and evaluate that data for risk scoring, and share 3 key sources for that alternative credit data.

These guides collect and catalogue all the best business verification platforms, KYB software, APIs, and other tools that will help you build out your verification tech stack, and automate what can be automated:

33. 6 Business Verification Services to Streamline KYB

These tools help with overall business verification, and help you automate your KYB process.

34. Secretary of State API: Everything You Need To Know

In addition to the top Secretary of State API tools out there, this guide covers what you need to know about how the API works, how it accesses SOS data, and how to integrate it within your existing process.

35. How to Choose an EIN Verification Service

These tools prioritize EIN verification, with direct pipelines into the SOS databases that contain authoritative EIN information for all U.S. businesses.

36. How to Choose the Best Watchlist Screening Software

This collection of tools focuses on watchlist screening, making sure your checks are compliant, and using the most up to date versions of sanctions and other watchlists.

37. How To Choose the Best OFAC Screening Software for KYB

This guide helps you choose from the 5 OFAC screening solutions out there, so you can select the one that meets your compliance needs.

38. 4 Best Adverse Media Screening Tools + How To Choose One

These tools have Adverse Media Screening capabilities, so you utilize some alternative data sources to help round out your KYB process and identify additional indicators of risk.

39. 5 Best Identity Verification APIs for Automating KYB

This collection of APIs are built for different aspects of identity verification, including tools suited to business onboarding, for global verification needs, for credit and bank deposits, and more.

40. Best Identity Fraud Protection Services for Businesses

These tools are fraud-driven, able to identify the biggest risks to your onboarding, and keep the biggest threats off of your platform.

Middesk’s founding team were all compliance analysts who truly understand the need for business verification automation, without sacrificing on compliance, risk assessment, and unique flexibility each company needs for their program.

That’s why Middesk was built specifically for businesses, helping them where they really need it. Our customers have seen a 30% lift in auto-approvals, 60-70% reduction in manual reviews needed, and an 80% reduction in verification speed.

Check out how Middesk Verification automates yes for you, or set up a demo with our business verification experts to learn how you can build your verification tech stack on Middesk.