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KYB collects information on three entities. The bank’s pipeline uses all three to decide.

Business

Legal name, DBA, EIN, structure (LLC, C-Corp, etc.), business address, phone, website, and NAICS industry code.

Controller

The individual who directs or significantly influences the business’s finances — CEO, CFO, or equivalent. Full PII: legal name, DOB, SSN, home address, phone, work email. The controller is always one person and is always collected, regardless of ownership.

Beneficial owners

Any individual who owns 25% or more of the business. Same PII as the controller, plus an ownership percentage. A business may have zero, one, or several. If the controller also owns 25%+, they are listed once as the controller with their ownership percentage set.
These are the conceptual buckets. Exact field names live in the bank account application creating guide.

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Pre-fill: what to send up front

Anything you already know about the business or the people running it should be passed when you create the application. Pre-filled fields show up populated in whichever surface the applicant ends up using, which cuts drop-off — every empty field on a KYB form is a place the applicant can stall, mistype, or abandon.
  • Send what you have, even if it’s partial. A pre-filled legal name and EIN is better than nothing, even if you don’t have SSNs.
  • The applicant can always edit. Pre-filled fields are not locked. If you have stale data, that’s fine — the applicant corrects it before submitting.
  • PII passes through your backend. SSNs and DOBs go in the create payload over your authenticated server-to-server connection. They are never returned in plaintext on subsequent reads.
  • Industry code matters. NAICS code drives risk scoring on the bank’s side. If you collected the business’s industry during sign-up, send it — generic codes get scrutinized harder than specific ones.
To pre-fill from your backend, send these fields on the REST create call and the onboarding component shows them to the applicant. Pre-populating an application covers what has to line up for that to work.