The 11 Best KYB Providers: Who Actually Reads the Register (2026)

Every vendor in business verification will tell you they have the data. Far fewer will tell you where it came from, and that is the only question that matters in KYB. A check that cannot name its source is not a check: it is a guess with a logo on it. When a regulator asks how you verified a counterparty, "a data provider told us" is not an answer, and neither is a record scraped off a website that the business itself controls.

So this guide sorts on one line. A provider either reads the official register, or it does not. Everything on the list below does, whether by direct connection, licensed feed or bulk filing. The web-data platforms that dominate the B2B data market are excluded on purpose, and named further down with the reason, because they get shortlisted for KYB more often than they should.

We sell business verification ourselves, through the CompanyData KYB API, so our own pitch sits in a clearly marked box partway down rather than at number one. The ranking is on merit. Start with the cheat sheet.

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1. Moody's Analytics: the depth nobody else has, at the price you would expect

The most complete view of private businesses money can buy, and it is priced exactly that way.

Orbis covers more than 625 million businesses across 200+ jurisdictions, and behind the entity records sit the filed accounts that make it the reference for private-business analysis. Moody's did not build this: it bought it, taking Bureau van Dijk in 2017 for roughly $3.5 billion and adding kompany, the register-connected verification layer, in 2022. The result is the deepest ownership and financial picture available anywhere, stitched together from three decades of somebody else's collecting.

New York, United States · Enterprise, quoted after a sales cycle · Built on: Official registers, Filed accounts, kompany live connections

2. Dun & Bradstreet: the identifier everyone else has to support

You often buy D&B for the D-U-N-S number rather than the data, and that is a perfectly good reason.

500M+ business records and the D-U-N-S numbering system, which is the closest thing this market has to a universal identifier. Procurement platforms, supplier onboarding and large ERP systems all speak it, and that network effect is what you are really buying. The file grew the same way Moody's did: Bisnode, the Nordic and DACH bureau, came in through a 2021 acquisition.

Jacksonville, United States · Enterprise, annual commitment · Built on: Official registers, D-U-N-S file, Payment experience

3. OpenCorporates: the open register aggregator

The best free starting point in this market, and nowhere near a complete KYB stack.

An open aggregation of official registers, built on the argument that legal-entity data should be public. For confirming that an entity exists, finding its registration number and reading its officers, it is genuinely useful and genuinely free. What it does not do is the rest of a KYB check: coverage and freshness vary sharply by jurisdiction, and the enrichment that turns a registry record into a risk decision is not there.

London, United Kingdom · Free tier, paid API and bulk licences · Built on: Official registers, Open data releases

5. Middesk: the US states, read properly

The right answer for US onboarding, because it goes where US businesses actually register.

There is no federal business register in the United States, which is the fact most global vendors quietly route around. Middesk does not: it reads the Secretary of State registers state by state, plus IRS and watchlist sources, and returns a verification built on where the entity legally exists. For a US-first platform onboarding business customers, that is worth more than a global file with thin American coverage.

San Francisco, United States · Self-serve, pay per check · Built on: Secretary of State registers, IRS records, Watchlists

6. AsiaVerify: the regional gap everyone else papers over

Where the global vendors get thin, this is the one that reads the local filing in the local language.

Asia Pacific is where global coverage claims quietly fall apart: the registers are real and current, but they file in Chinese, Japanese and Korean, and translating them is work most vendors will not do. AsiaVerify does it, returning verified entity and ownership records from the regional registers rather than from a resold extract that was accurate two years ago.

Singapore · Pay per check or tiered · Built on: APAC official registers, Local filings

7. Creditsafe: verification with payment behaviour attached

Strongest when the question is not only whether they exist but whether they pay.

Europe's most-used business credit platform, built on registry records with payment behaviour layered over the top. That combination suits onboarding where credit exposure and identity get decided together, and Benelux depth improved sharply once Graydon came into the group as GraydonCreditsafe. The trade is the usual one: a subscription shaped around seats and reports rather than an API you meter.

Caerphilly, United Kingdom · Subscription, tiered by volume · Built on: Official registers, Payment experience, Graydon file

8. LexisNexis Risk Solutions: the bank's orchestration layer

Bought by institutions that need one vendor to answer to the regulator for everything.

Less a verification source than a compliance platform that orchestrates them, combining entity data, sanctions and PEP screening, adverse media and case management under one roof. Banks buy it because a single accountable vendor across the whole programme is worth real money to them. For a mid-market platform that needs a business checked during signup, it is the wrong shape and the wrong price.

Alpharetta, United States · Enterprise, six figures and up · Built on: Official registers, Sanctions and PEP lists, Adverse media

9. CreditReform: the DACH incumbent

If your exposure is German, Austrian or Swiss, the local incumbent still knows things the global files do not.

A cooperative of regional offices that has been collecting on German-speaking businesses for well over a century, which shows in the places automated collection does not reach: small private entities, partnerships, the businesses that file the bare minimum. The structure is the catch, because a federated membership model does not turn into a clean API as readily as a single vendor does.

Neuss, Germany · Membership and subscription · Built on: Handelsregister, Local offices, Payment experience

10. FullCircl: UK onboarding, front to back

Built around the onboarding journey rather than around the data, which suits UK regulated firms.

Companies House data wrapped in customer lifecycle intelligence, aimed at UK banks and insurers who want the same record to serve onboarding, monitoring and relationship management. The proposition is workflow rather than raw source: you are buying the process around the check as much as the check.

London, United Kingdom · Subscription, mid-market and up · Built on: Companies House, Regulatory sources

11. Strise: the Nordic challenger

A modern take on AML and KYB workflow, strongest where it started.

Nordic registry records and AML workflow in one place, aimed at teams who found the incumbents slow to work with. Coverage is honest about its centre of gravity, which is Norway and the surrounding markets, and the automation around review and monitoring is the reason to look rather than the breadth of the file.

Oslo, Norway · Custom, mid-market · Built on: Nordic registers, Sanctions lists

How four vendors became the whole market

The names on this list are fewer than they look. Most of the depth in business verification was collected by firms that no longer exist independently, and understanding who bought whom explains why two vendors sometimes quote you the same record at very different prices.

Who is still independent?

Worth knowing before you sign, because an acquired vendor's roadmap belongs to its parent, and the record you are quoted may be the same record a sibling brand sells.

Why scraped web data cannot do KYB

This is the exclusion that shapes the list above, and it is worth stating plainly because these vendors get shortlisted for verification work constantly. Bright Data, Coresignal, People Data Labs, Clearbit and the rest of the web-data market sell genuinely good products. None of them is a KYB source.

The reason is not quality, it is provenance. A scraped record describes what a business publishes about itself, and a business under investigation controls what it publishes. A registry record describes what it filed with a government body under legal obligation, with a date and a document behind it. When a regulator asks how you verified a counterparty, the second one is an answer and the first one is not. Registry data also captures what web data structurally cannot: dissolution, insolvency, officer changes, the shell layered between an operating business and its owner.

Use web data for the job it is good at, which is finding and enriching prospects. Use the register for the job that has to stand up later.

• EU Business Registers Interconnection System (BRIS) : The official EU gateway into national business registers, and the primary source most European verification ultimately rests on.
• Companies House (United Kingdom) : The UK register, free to search, with the register of people with significant control that underpins UK UBO work.
• SEC EDGAR (United States) : Filings for SEC registrants only. Most US businesses never file here and live in a state register instead.
• FATF Recommendation 24, beneficial ownership : The international standard that turned UBO identification from good practice into a supervised obligation.

How to choose a KYB provider

1. Ask where each field comes from Not which registers a vendor covers, but which register a given field came from and when it was read. A provider that answers this easily is reading the source. One that treats it as an odd question is reselling somebody else's extract.

2. Test on your own failures, not their samples Take fifty counterparties your current process could not resolve and run those. Hit rate on a vendor's demo file tells you nothing. Any serious provider will give you a sandbox, and one that will not let you test before signing has told you something.

3. Check the markets you actually onboard in Global coverage claims are averages, and averages hide the market that matters to you. Depth in your top three jurisdictions beats breadth across two hundred.

4. Decide whether you need UBO or just existence Confirming a business is registered and active is a much cheaper problem than walking an ownership chain through three holding layers in two countries. Vendors price the second one very differently, so know which you are buying.

5. Match the commercial model to the workload Per-call pricing suits verification inside an onboarding flow. Seat-based subscriptions suit analysts running reports. Buying the wrong shape is the most common way teams overspend here.

6. Plan for monitoring from day one A KYB check is accurate on the day it runs. Dissolutions, officer changes and ownership moves happen afterwards, so ask what re-screening an existing base costs before you need it.

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