KYB and KYC, and where the line sits here
Two different questions -- is this company real, is this person real -- and Apidentity answers mostly the first one.
The two terms get used almost interchangeably in the compliance-tooling market, and they answer different questions. KYB — Know Your Business — asks whether a company is who it says it is: does it exist on the register, is it in good standing, who actually controls it. KYC — Know Your Customer — asks the same question about a person. Apidentity is a KYB engine with one narrow, explicitly-scoped KYC step inside it, not a general-purpose identity platform for either.
What KYB checks, here
The business register, the European Commission's VAT registry, a parsed extract, and — separately — the restricted-party and destination-control lists that decide whether trade with that company is clear. None of this is about a person; it is about whether the legal entity exists, what the public record says about it, and whether trading with it is currently restricted. What Apidentity is and how the answer is reached cover the mechanism; what screening covers covers the trade half specifically.
What KYC would check, and where Apidentity stops
Full KYC verifies an individual against government-issued identity documents, sometimes with a biometric liveness check — a different discipline from a business register lookup, and one this engine does not perform. What it does check is narrower and specific to enrolment: that the person declaring is who they say they are, and is entitled to act for the company — matched against the officers the register names, or against a documented mandate. That single step is meant to rest on a qualified trust service under eIDAS, a regulated provider rather than a self-assessment; where one is not yet contracted, it runs simulated and every page says so. See simulated identity, on a demo certificate for exactly what that changes and doesn't.
There is no route here to verify a person who isn't enrolling a company, and no biometric
or document-liveness capability at all — DOCUMENT and
DOCUMENT_LIVENESS assurance levels are unreachable by design, because no vendor
for either is contracted and a level nobody can evidence is a level nobody should be able to
claim. A counterparty relying on a certificate is relying on business verification, plus one
scoped fact about the declarant — not a statement about anyone else at the company.
Why the distinction is worth making explicitly
Because the two get bundled in most vendor pitches, and a reader comparing "KYB providers" is often actually asking whether a tool also does KYC, or the reverse. Apidentity's answer is specific rather than expansive: business verification that a company earns once and reuses everywhere — see checking a certificate for the free tier, and understanding your grade for the paid judgement built on top of it — with exactly one identity fact about exactly one person, scoped to what enrolling requires and nothing more.