KYB in 2026: What 50+ Compliance Professionals Told Us About the State of Business Onboarding

We recently hosted a live webinar with our CPO Jan Puzicha and our Head of Product & Design Fabian Friess to talk about the real-world pain points in KYC / KYB, run a live demo of our ownership drill-down and UBO resolution feature, and give attendees an early look at a prototype we're building next.

Before we got into the product, we asked the room three questions. 

‍

What the Data Said

Poll 1: How does your team currently handle KYB checks?

Among the respondents:

• 44% are fully manual (PDFs, emails, spreadsheets)
• 40% are partially automated, but still rely on many manual steps
• 16% are mostly automated with integrated workflow tools
• 0% described themselves as fully automated

That means 84% of compliance teams at regulated institutions are still either entirely manual or only partially automated. Not a minority edge case. The majority.

This tracks with what we see in our own onboarding conversations. KYB is not a problem that has been solved at the tooling level for most teams.

Poll 2: What is the greatest challenge for your team?

• 28% said manual process overhead (slow, error-prone workflows)
• 24% said data fragmentation (too many sources to reconcile)
• 12% said scale (volume growing too fast to handle manually)
• 4% said regulatory change (EU AML requirements)
• 32% said all of the above

The low vote for regulatory change is worth noting. As Jan pointed out on the call, if you haven't solved data fragmentation and manual overhead yet, regulatory change feels secondary. But with the EU AML Regulation applying from July 2027, that 4% is likely to grow fast.

Poll 3: What should we demo?

Attendees voted on which Sinpex capability to see live:

• 44% chose Ownership Drill-down and UBO Resolution
• 30% chose Customer Self-declaration and Outreach
• 26% chose Risk Scoring and Profiling

Ownership drill-down won. So that's where we went.

‍

Why KYB Is Still So Painful

Jan opened with a framework that maps out what end-to-end KYB actually requires. Most tools solve one piece of it. Very few solve the whole chain.

The four layers are:

Layer 1 — Data Acquisition: Identifying the company, collecting registry documents across jurisdictions, handling customer outreach and self-declaration, and pulling in third-party data sources for credit or risk overlays.

Layer 2 — Data Interpretation: Extracting structured information from registry documents, resolving ownership trees to identify UBOs, and tracing every fact back to its source document.

Layer 3 — Process Orchestration: Running identity verification for acting persons, AML screening for PEP and sanctions exposure, managing exceptions and human review, and capturing a defensible sign-off trail.

Layer 4 — Post-Onboarding Monitoring: Watching for register changes, running risk-based re-KYC cycles, and managing the full customer lifecycle on an ongoing basis.

‍

The pain comes from stitching this together across multiple tools. Every tool boundary is a media break. Every media break is a potential audit gap, a delay, or an error.

Sinpex is built to cover all four layers in a single system, with a unified audit trail.

‍

Inside the UBO Drill-Down: How Automated Ownership Resolution Works

Fabian walked through a live demo of the Ownership tab in Sinpex. Here is what the workflow looks like in practice.

Step 1 — Company identification

The system identifies the case company and retrieves the relevant registry record to confirm it is dealing with the right legal entity.

Step 2 — Document purchase and extraction

Sinpex automatically purchases the registry report and the listing of owners from the official register. AI then extracts all structured information from these documents, including shareholder names, ownership percentages, and voting rights.

Step 3 — Layer-by-layer ownership tree construction

Once the first layer of owners is identified, the process recurses. For every corporate entity with a shareholding above 25%, the system drills down again: purchase documents, extract data, identify the next layer. This continues until the system reaches natural persons who qualify as Ultimate Beneficial Owners.

The process is fully automated. No analyst needs to manually pull documents or enter shareholder names.

Step 4 — Color-coded task transparency

The UI makes the state of every task visible at a glance:

• Bold green tasks have been confirmed by a human analyst
• Light green tasks were completed automatically by the system
• Yellow tasks need human review because only a single source was found (legally required under the four-eyes principle)
• Red tasks are blocked because no information was retrieved at all

Blocked tasks bubble up to the case overview so analysts always know exactly where action is needed and what is preventing the case from progressing.

Evidence tracing

Every piece of information in the ownership tree links back to the source document. Analysts can click on any data point and jump directly to the highlighted passage in the original registry document. Nothing is asserted without a traceable source.

‍

A First Look at What We Are Building Next

After the demo, Fabian previewed a prototype for a redesigned case questionnaire, the central data collection layer in Sinpex. This is not yet shipped, but is in active development.

The core idea is a unified view of all data sources, ranked by priority: manual overrides, official register documents, transparency register data, self-declarations from customers, and any additional sources. For each data field, the system calculates a "winning value" — the most authoritative source available — and displays it clearly.

What's new in the prototype:

When two sources disagree on a field, the system flags the deviation for human review. The analyst sees both values, chooses the correct one, and the case records a human confirmation. No silent conflicts.

When a required field is empty because no source has the data, the analyst can resolve it in three ways: purchase the registry document directly from within Sinpex, upload a document they have sourced themselves, or trigger a customer outreach. The outreach option generates a pre-configured email with a secure link, through which the end customer can upload the missing document. Once submitted, it flows back into Sinpex automatically.

Fabian also showed a drag-and-drop mechanism for manual extraction: if a document contains a piece of information the system did not automatically extract, the analyst can highlight the text and drag it to the corresponding field. The system then derives related fields from that input automatically.

The vision is a near-fully automated workflow where a human steps in only to review, not to collect.

‍

EU AML 2027: Two Changes That Will Affect Every Team in the Room

Two regulatory changes came up during the demo as directly relevant to what Sinpex is building for.

Change 1 — UBO calculation method

Currently, many institutions calculate UBO percentages using the dominance method, where the UBO inherits the ownership percentage at the first level of the ownership tree. Under the EU AML Regulation applying from July 2027, this shifts to the multiplication method. Ownership is calculated by multiplying percentages across every level of the chain from the case company to the natural person.

Sinpex is already building this transition into the platform.

‍

Change 2 — Relevant parties screening

Under the new regulation, institutions will need to identify and AML-screen all intermediate corporate entities sitting between the UBO and the case company, not only the UBO themselves. Sinpex already tracks these as "relevant parties" in the ownership tree and can send them directly into the AML screening workflow.

For teams currently handling ownership analysis manually or with fragmented tools, these changes will meaningfully increase the scope of work. The earlier the process is automated, the less disruptive the transition.

‍

Questions From the Room

A few questions from the Q&A are worth highlighting here:

Who is Sinpex built for? Regulated financial institutions where audit readiness is a hard requirement, and where the primary onboarding challenge involves businesses rather than individuals. Banks, payment service providers, and fintechs with B2B onboarding volumes are the core use case.

Do you support all EU countries? We retrieve documents from all EU registers. AI extraction quality varies by jurisdiction, as our team trains models on each document format, adding roughly one new jurisdiction every three to four weeks.

Is there an API? Yes. Sinpex is an API-first platform. Everything you see in the UI is also available via API, so teams with a primary system can integrate the full functionality without switching interfaces.

How do you handle conflicting data between sources? Through the winning value system described above. The most authoritative source takes precedence, deviations are flagged, and the analyst resolves them before the case can be approved.

What about non-publicly accessible UBO registries? Where registries require institutional credentials, Sinpex can access them on your behalf using your login. For registries that cannot be accessed at all, the fallback is manual upload — you retrieve the document, upload it to Sinpex, and the system processes it from there.

‍

The Summary View

The poll results from this webinar reinforce what we hear in every sales conversation: KYB is still overwhelmingly manual or semi-manual for most regulated institutions, and the operational and compliance costs of that are real and growing.

Faster onboarding decisions reduce time-to-business and cut onboarding churn. Automation reduces cost per case and lets teams scale without growing headcount at the same rate. A fully traceable audit trail means defensible decisions when regulators or auditors come knocking. And with the EU AML Regulation on the horizon, the teams that have automated now will absorb the new requirements far more smoothly than those that have not.

‍

Watch the Recording or Talk to Us Live

Missed the webinar? Watch it on demand here.

Want to see the product with your own use case? Book a 30-minute call with our team at sinpex.de/contact.

Already a Sinpex customer? Reach out to your customer success manager to go deeper on the roadmap items covered in this session.

‍