A KYB questionnaire, short for Know Your Business, is the review that banks and insurers conduct before opening a business account, concluding insurance, or continuing an existing relationship. They want to know who is behind your business, what the business does, and whether there are any signals that warrant extra attention. The documents requested in this process largely recur with each bank or insurer, although how strictly they are assessed varies by institution.
The core usually consists of five components: a current extract from the Chamber of Commerce, the UBO declaration with the corresponding identity documents of the ultimate beneficial owners, the articles of association of the business, insight into the shareholder structure, and a statement on the nature of the business activities. With an insurer, there is often an additional statement of turnover or sector, because this affects risk assessment. None of these documents need to be specially prepared for the bank; these are documents that virtually every business already has somewhere.
Why the UBO register is not always sufficient
Many entrepreneurs think that registration in the UBO register is sufficient proof. That register shows who has been registered as the ultimate beneficial owner, but in practice a bank or insurer cannot blindly rely on it. They therefore often request additional valid identity documents from each UBO, and sometimes a diagram of the shareholder structure if it runs through multiple entities. This is the detail that most often causes delays in a KYB review: not the submission of the UBO declaration itself, but getting complete and current identity documents from everyone listed in that declaration.
You can read more extensively about what the terms UBO and KYB precisely mean and how they relate to each other in the knowledge base with explanations by subject.
Validity is the second point of attention
A Chamber of Commerce extract is accepted by most banks only if it is not older than a few months; an expired identity document of a UBO is rejected in any case. Because a KYB review is not a one-time occurrence but is periodically repeated at many institutions, the practical problem is often not finding the documents, but keeping track of which ones have expired by the time the next review comes around. This applies not only to the Chamber of Commerce and identity documents, but also to any statements about business activities that may become outdated over time.
What you do not normally need to provide
A KYB questionnaire concerns the identity and structure of your business, not your business operations in the broader sense. Data that has nothing to do with ownership, control or the nature of your activities, should in principle not be included. If you are unsure whether a requested document reasonably falls within a KYB review, that is something to ask the institution itself or have assessed by a lawyer; a general assessment of this cannot be given here.
Once collected, needed again and again
The inconvenience of a KYB review is not the first time, but the repetition. The same bank asks again after some time for a current extract, and a second bank or insurer requests virtually the same documents in a slightly different order. A file in which the documents and their validity dates are clearly listed, saves mainly time, not content. How such a file is structured and where the information comes from is explained on the page on how supplia.eu works.
If you want to know whether your business will soon be faced with a KYB questionnaire and what documents are typically requested in the process, then the free check in a few questions provides an initial indication. For questions about how your data is handled in this process, you can visit the page on data security.