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Verify · Business verification

Know your business, not just your customer.

Run KYB checks on the businesses you onboard — merchants, SME borrowers, partners — with data aggregated in real time from official company registries and other authoritative and web sources. Fuzzy search finds a match from a partial or variant business name; from there, pull registration data, verify beneficial owners, and enrich with AI-powered insights, all on demand.

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Overview

Real-time business verification for onboarding and due diligence

Verifying a business is harder than verifying a person — there's no single ID card, and the information that matters (registration status, ownership, standing) is scattered across government registries, licensing bodies, and public web sources that differ from market to market. Smile's KYB (Know Your Business) API pulls it all into one call: submit a business name, and fuzzy search matches it against your market's company registry and web records even when the name is incomplete or spelled differently than the registry entry.

From that match, Smile builds a structured business profile — registration number, tax identifiers, industry classification, digital footprint, and registration status — with premium data points and AI-powered enrichment available on demand. Ultimate beneficial owner (UBO) verification and document processing for permits and registration filings extend the same check to the people behind the business, so a platform onboarding a merchant, SME borrower, or partner gets one continuous risk profile covering the entity and its owners, wherever they're registered.

Coverage varies by product. Registry matching draws on official company registries and business licensing authorities in each supported market.

What you get

Features

AI-powered fuzzy search
Match a business from a partial or variant name across official company registries and web sources — no exact registered name required.
Real-time registry data
Pull business registration number, tax identification number, and registration status directly from your market's official registries, updated live.
UBO verification
Verify Ultimate Beneficial Owners against government identity and licensing records, plus phone, email, and sanctions signals.
Business document processing
Extract and validate data from business permits, registration certificates, and incorporation filings against registry data already on file.
AI-powered enrichment
Optional AI analysis adds a business summary, digital footprint insight, and enhanced risk indicators on top of the base profile.
Why it matters

Benefits

Onboard businesses in minutes, not days
Real-time registry checks replace manual verification against government portals, cutting business onboarding from a multi-day process to a single API call.
Pay for what you use
Granular, on-demand pricing means you retrieve base business data cheaply and only pay more for premium fields or AI enrichment when a deeper check is warranted.
See through shell structures
UBO verification surfaces the real individuals behind a business, closing a common gap in AML and partner due diligence.
One profile for the business and its owners
Business and beneficial-owner data live on the same risk profile as individual KYC, so downstream screening doesn't require a second lookup.
FAQ

Common questions

What data sources does Smile's Business Verification (KYB) API pull from?

Smile aggregates business data in real time from official company registries, licensing bodies, and other authoritative and web sources — including registration numbers, tax identifiers, industry classification, and digital presence — normalizing it into one structured profile per business for KYB checks, adapted to the registries used in each market.

How does fuzzy search help when a business name is incomplete or misspelled?

Fuzzy search uses AI-powered matching to find a business even from a partial, misspelled, or variant name, so an onboarding team doesn't need an exact registered name to start a KYB check.

What is UBO verification and why does it matter for business verification (KYB)?

UBO (Ultimate Beneficial Owner) verification confirms the real individuals who own or control a business, checked against government identity and licensing records plus phone, email, and sanctions signals — a core requirement for KYB, AML, and regulatory compliance, since shell structures often hide the actual owner behind layers of corporate registration.

Can Smile verify business documents like permits and registration certificates?

Yes. Smile's document processing extracts and validates data from business permits, registration certificates, and incorporation filings, cross-referencing what's on the document against the registry data already pulled for that business.

Get connected

Ready to get connected?

Start with one capability or deploy the full lifecycle — Smile plugs into your existing onboarding and underwriting flows either way.

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