KYB Verification

Because an ABN confirms that an entity is registered, and registration is the cheapest part of creating a company.

Companies are inexpensive to create and easy to abandon. A registered entity with no trading history, a virtual office address and a recently appointed sole director is entirely valid on the register and is also the standard shape of shell-company fraud.

The parts that carry the risk sit behind the registration: who the directors and beneficial owners really are, whether any of them are banned or disqualified, whether they appear across a cluster of related entities, and what has changed since you onboarded. A check that stops at the ABN answers none of those.

Six sources, Australian and UK, with each result naming the register it came from:

• ASIC company register — search and extract
• ASIC officeholders and shareholders — including ID check
• ASIC banned and disqualified persons
• Company risk report — ASIC-sourced
• Business intelligence by ABN — drawing on ABR, ANZSIC and AUSTRAC data
• UK Companies House — company and officer

Australian and UK company data resolve in the same check, so verifying a local entity with a UK parent does not require engaging a second provider.

Registration details and status history, officeholders together with their other appointments, shareholdings, registered documents, and risk indicators, all assembled from ASIC data into a single report.

The risk indicators are the part worth reading closely. Recent status changes, a newly changed registered address, or a rapid turnover of directors are each unremarkable in isolation and meaningful in combination.

Because officeholders come with their other appointments attached, the report shows the entity in context instead of in isolation, which is where most of the useful signal is.

By following ownership relationships through any intermediate companies until they reach the natural persons behind the business, then checking those individuals as people.

Each entity's ownership is recorded as a relationship, and direct and indirect ownership percentages are calculated from that chain, so a person holding 30% through two layers of holding companies is surfaced with their effective stake instead of being lost in the structure. Connections are shown both as a list and as an interactive diagram, and they span programs across your account.

One limit is important to design around. The calculation is ownership-based. Someone who controls a business without holding an ownership percentage (a director, trustee, officer or other associated person) is not included in the UBO table unless an ownership relationship has also been recorded for them.

That matters because AML/CTF beneficial ownership covers control as well as ownership. The ownership chain is calculated for you; identifying controllers who hold no equity remains a step your process has to cover, using officeholder and appointment data.

Yes. Officer searches link a person to their current and past appointments across entities.

This is how connected entities surface. Two customers that look unrelated in your own records may share a director, and that single link often explains a pattern that made no sense when the files were read separately.

It is also how phoenixing becomes visible: the same individual appearing as director of a sequence of companies that are incorporated, accumulate liabilities and are abandoned, with a new entity picking up where the last one stopped.

You attach a monitor to a program and give it a schedule. On each run it re-screens every entity in that program against its source (Business Screening for ASIC, UK Business Screening for Companies House) and raises an event for anything new.

Schedules range from daily through weekdays, a nominated day of the week, the 1st or 15th of the month, or quarterly. Runs happen automatically overnight and you are notified by email when new events appear. A monitor can also be set to run on demand, and any monitor can be triggered manually from its detail page, which is useful after you change its configuration.

Events arrive with the matched record attached, so a reviewer can see what changed without going back to the register to work it out. For company data, a monthly or quarterly cadence is usually enough to catch director resignations, status changes and registered-address moves well inside the window that matters.

Companies House search, company and officer reports, and filed documents: seven endpoint groups in total.

The intent is sufficiency, not completeness for its own sake: enough to verify a UK parent company or a UK-resident officer as part of an Australian onboarding decision, without engaging a separate provider and reconciling two sets of output.

Yes. Bulk ASIC search handles portfolio-scale runs, and the results feed the same monitors as one-off checks.

That combination is what makes an existing book manageable. You can run every entity you already deal with through a single pass to establish a baseline, then let monitors carry it forward. The alternative is choosing between reviewing thousands of entities manually and not reviewing them at all.