Members Only Article

From KYC to KYB – Know Your Business

March 27, 2026 | 4 minutes reading time | By Jim Romeo

Digital verification and compliance tools evolve to meet the complex challenges of identifying and onboarding businesses.

Know your customer (KYC) is a known and essential quantity in risk management and compliance. The concept, refined on the corporate level as Know Your Business (KYB), links entity data directly to relationship quality, trust and profitability.

That is what Kyle Mack, CEO and co-founder of Middesk, is banking on with its KYB “verification infrastructure.”

Mack has written that the cost of getting onboarding wrong is substantial, that workflow and data glitches, mismatches and missing information puts conversions at risk. Middesk addresses data quality and related problems to enable faster onboarding. 

As with generalized KYC, KYB involves the application of data and technology to verify client identity, legitimacy and risk profile. It is part of the anti-crime, anti-money laundering and countering-the-financing of terrorism framework designed to protect financial-system integrity in the face of regulatory tightening and increasingly complex threats.

Kyle Mack of Middesk

As Mack explains it, KYC emerged with a focus on individuals’ identities, dating back to the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 and bolstered by the post-9/11 Patriot Act...

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Topics: Regulation & Compliance, AML & Fraud, Data

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