They sound similar and solve different problems. Here is the practical difference.
2026-08-20 · 5 min read
KYC and KYB sit next to each other in every compliance conversation, and they are constantly confused. The short version: KYC (Know Your Customer) verifies individuals; KYB (Know Your Business) verifies business entities. They rely on different data, answer different questions, and fall under different rules.
KYC verifies that a person is who they claim to be. It relies on personal identity data, government IDs, dates of birth, addresses, and it is used when a business needs to confirm an individual customer. Because it concerns individuals, it operates in the consumer-data world, with the privacy and regulatory constraints that come with it.
KYB verifies that a business is real, registered, and in good standing. Instead of personal IDs, it draws on public business records: Secretary of State registrations, business and professional licenses, corporate status and officers, and sanctions and exclusion lists.
A thorough KYB check confirms the legal entity exists, reads its status (active, dissolved, delinquent), identifies its officers and registered agent, confirms the licenses it needs to operate, and screens it against watchlists. Stronger checks resolve the same company across states and match it to the federal identifiers it holds.
Individuals have relatively centralized identity systems. Businesses do not. There is no national business registry in the United States; each state runs its own, and a company operating in several states appears in each separately, often under slightly different names. Add county, federal, and licensing records, and a single business is scattered across dozens of systems.
That is why KYB depends on entity resolution: joining those records to one canonical business so a check is not fooled by a name variant, and so a flagged company surfaces even under a subsidiary.
Because KYB concerns businesses rather than consumers, it falls outside the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Public business records used for business-purpose decisions, onboarding a vendor, verifying a company, screening a counterparty, are not consumer reports. That keeps KYB in the business-purpose lane, provided the data itself excludes private individuals.
They are different data problems. KYB uses public business records; KYC uses personal identity data. A business-records layer like Amalgament handles the KYB side and is non-FCRA by construction.
KYB is not governed by the FCRA because it concerns businesses, not individual consumers. It still must use the data lawfully and for business purposes.
KYB & AML · What is KYB · Non-FCRA business data
Keep reading: How to run public-record due diligence on a company · Permit-based lead generation: finding businesses about to spend · How entity resolution works (and why name-matching fails) · What public records reveal about a commercial property · How to give an AI agent access to public records (MCP)