KYB is customer due diligence applied to a legal person. The firm confirms the company's name, number, legal form, date of incorporation and status, its registered office, its directors and its shareholders, and then traces ownership to the natural persons who are its beneficial owners. The evidence comes from the company registry in the place of incorporation, not from documents the customer supplies.
In Hong Kong the Companies Registry holds this record. A company particulars search shows the company's status, registered office, share capital, shareholders, directors and company secretary, and lists every document filed. In Mainland China the record is the registration behind the business licence, held by the State Administration for Market Regulation and published on the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System. Offshore registers such as the BVI and the Cayman Islands publish less: a search confirms the company and its registered agent, and ownership is traced through other evidence.
Why it matters
A corporate customer can hide a person. Regulators expect a firm to understand the ownership and control structure, and the HKMA guideline (paragraph 4.3.7) lists a record in an independent company registry among the documents that verify a legal person's name, legal form and current existence; a certificate of incorporation alone does not prove current existence.
How Fill Easy relates to it
CorpVerify runs KYB as a service: it finds the registry, buys the record, translates it where needed, summarises it and returns the original documents with structured data. Automated Hong Kong company particulars come back in about 15 minutes. UBO tracing through multi-layer Mainland and offshore structures can be added to any order.