KYB + Affiliation

Workflow Category: Identity — KYB

Supported Countries: US

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Overview

The KYB + Company Affiliation workflow layers the Employer Affiliation checker on top of the KYB checker. It first verifies that the business entity exists and matches IRS and Secretary of State records, then tests whether the individual submitting the request is actually connected to that business by evaluating their email address against sources associated with the entity, and finally confirms the user controls that address.

The distinction matters: KYB alone confirms a business is real. It says nothing about whether the person filling in the form has any relationship to it. This workflow closes that gap.

Workflow Steps

Steps are chained by policy obligation. Each step's policy decision either issues an obligation naming the next step or terminates the transaction; the default action at every step is deny. A failure at any step halts the workflow, and later steps do not execute.

Business name and address collected at Step 1 are carried forward to Step 2 automatically and are not re-prompted. TIN/EIN is not carried forward.

End User Requirements

Step 1 — business attributes:

• Business name — required (max 500 characters)
• Business address — required; state at minimum (max 500 characters)
• TIN/EIN — optional; enables live IRS EIN verification
• Business website URL — optional; enables additional website consistency signals

Step 2 — affiliation:

• Email address — required. Submitted as the Email attribute and evaluated against sources associated with the business verified in Step 1.

Step 3 — possession:

• One-time passcode delivered to the submitted email address.

Role in Layered Verification

Business-plus-affiliation assurance. Appropriate for B2B account opening, vendor and supplier onboarding, partner portal registration, and any flow where a request is made on behalf of an organization and the requester's authority to act for it has not otherwise been established.

This workflow does not verify the individual's personal identity. For that tier, see KYB + Affiliation + Onboarding.

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Acquired Attributes

Inherits AcquiredWatchlistHitsForBusiness from the KYB checker.

For attributes acquired by the affiliation step, see Employer Affiliation.

Assertions

This workflow returns the seven base KYB assertions, documented on the KYB checker page, plus the following from the affiliation step:

The KYB rating scale is unchanged from the base checker; see KYB → Rating Scale.

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Notes and Limitations

Affiliation failure is terminal. When both affiliation assertions fail, the policy returns deny and the transaction ends. Step 3 does not execute. Design downstream handling around the workflow's final decision rather than around a per-step result, since later steps may not have produced one.

Business attributes are reused, not re-collected. Because Step 2 inherits the business name and address from Step 1, affiliation is always evaluated against the entity that was actually verified. There is no path by which a user verifies one business and claims affiliation with another.

Affiliation depends on data coverage for the entity. A business can pass KYB cleanly — confirmed in IRS and Secretary of State records — and still return no affiliation match, if no email sources are associated with it in the underlying data. A fail on both assertions indicates the absence of a match, not evidence of a negative relationship.

Email possession is separate from affiliation. Steps 2 and 3 answer different questions. Affiliation asks whether the address belongs to the business; OTP asks whether the user controls the address. Neither substitutes for the other.

This workflow must be used with ID Dataweb's gateway implementation option.

Related Resources

→ KYB | → Employer Affiliation | → KYB + Affiliation + Onboarding