UBO Screening
UBO Screening that recurses until it finds the real owners
Ownership rarely ends at the first layer. Zyphe's agents treat every corporate shareholder as a new case: they pull the registry extract, read the shareholder table, and recurse, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, until the chain ends in natural persons. Effective ownership is multiplied through every layer, owners above your threshold are flagged as UBOs, and every hop carries its registry evidence into the case file your team approves.
Trusted by those who trust no one.
Built for ownership structures that fight back
Corporate registries agents pull extracts and shareholder tables from
Markets where Zyphe runs verification and screening
Default beneficial-ownership threshold, aligned to AMLR, configurable per programme
Recursive resolution, not a one-level lookup
Most tools stop at the first shareholder table. Zyphe's agents keep going until there is a natural person at the end of every branch, and show their work at every hop.
Recursive entity resolution
Every corporate shareholder becomes a new lookup: registry extract, officers, shareholder table, next layer. Cross-border chains are followed into each jurisdiction's own registry.
Effective ownership math
Percentages are multiplied through the chain, so an owner three layers up is measured by what they actually control. Thresholds are applied to effective ownership, not paper shares.
Structures that resist analysis
Circular holdings, nominee patterns, and branches that dead-end without a natural person are flagged for your reviewers instead of silently dropped.
Screened, evidenced, approved
Every identified UBO is screened against sanctions, PEP, and adverse media lists. The full trace, extract by extract, lands in a decision-ready case file for your team's sign-off.
How recursive UBO screening works
A real resolution follows the ownership tree wherever it goes. Here is the shape of a typical case: two layers of holding companies, three registries, two UBOs.
The agent pulls the official registry extract for the company under review: legal existence, officers, and the shareholder table that seeds the tree.
Each entity in the shareholder table becomes a new lookup in its home registry. The agent multiplies ownership percentages through the chain, detects loops, and keeps going until every branch ends in a natural person or a documented dead end.
Natural persons above the threshold are flagged as UBOs and screened against sanctions, PEP, and adverse media lists. The complete evidence trail goes to your reviewers as a decision-ready case file; adverse decisions always carry your team's named approval.
Better compliance in 190+ Countries
Banking Secrecy Act
Enforces strict record-keeping and reporting requirements for financial institutions to prevent money laundering and financial crimes in the United States.
Anti-money Laundering Act
Establishes measures and responsibilities for financial intermediaries in Switzerland to prevent money laundering and terrorist financing.
Proceeds of Crime
Canadian regulation requiring financial institutions to detect, prevent, and report suspicious transactions related to criminal proceeds.
Terrorist Financing Act
Legislation enforcing measures in Canada to detect, prevent, and report financial activities linked to terrorist financing.
Anti-money Laundering
Australian regulation mandating financial entities implement robust compliance measures to detect, prevent, and report money laundering activities.
Counter-Terrorism Financing Act
Australian law ensuring financial institutions identify, monitor, and report activities related to financing of terrorism to maintain national and global security.
Integrate in as little as 15 minutes
curl -X POST https://verify.zyphe.com/v1/login_sessions \
-H 'Authorization: Bearer <API_KEY>' \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-d '{"auth_type": "email"}'
Frequent Questions
UBO screening identifies the Ultimate Beneficial Owners of a business, the natural persons who ultimately own or control it through any number of intermediate entities, and screens them against sanctions, PEP, and adverse media lists. It is required in customer due diligence for corporate customers under AML rules in the EU, UK, and US.
There is no fixed layer limit. Agents recurse until every branch of the ownership tree ends in a natural person, a listed company, a state entity, or a documented dead end. Each layer is resolved from the official registry of the entity's home jurisdiction, and loops between entities are detected rather than followed forever.
By multiplying percentages through the chain. If a person owns 80% of a holding company that owns 55% of another holding that owns 64% of the target, their effective ownership is 28.2%, above a 25% threshold even though no single link says so. Zyphe applies thresholds to effective ownership and logs the calculation in the case file.
The EU's AMLR sets beneficial ownership at 25% or more, direct or indirect, and applies from 10 July 2027 as a single rulebook; many institutions apply stricter internal thresholds for higher-risk customers. Zyphe defaults to 25% and lets your programme configure lower thresholds per risk tier.
KYB is the full corporate due-diligence workflow: legal existence, registry records, screening, and periodic reviews. UBO screening is the hardest step inside it, resolving who actually owns the company. They run on the same agents and case files; this page exists because ownership resolution is where most tools stop early. Explore KYB Software
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