Fight evolving business fraud with Persona’s new KYB solutions
When you think of a fraudster, you probably picture an individual — someone stealing identities, taking over accounts, or making fraudulent purchases. But fraudsters aren’t just impersonating individuals anymore — they’re also masquerading as businesses, drawn by the higher return on investment that business fraud offers.
Think about the sign-up bonuses platforms offer to businesses versus individuals. Fraudsters notice this too — and they’re making millions exploiting these gaps. In fact, the Federal Trade Commission reported that losses from business impersonation alone reached $752 million in 2023.
As someone who’s spent years building Know Your Business (KYB) solutions, I can tell you that business fraud is evolving fast. The tactics used to commit business fraud are starting to mirror those seen in identity fraud — both in scale and sophistication. Whether it’s fraudulent merchants infiltrating your marketplace or fake businesses applying for loans, you’re likely already feeling the impact.
The takeaway is clear: business fraud isn’t a future problem — it’s happening now. As such, you need a proactive strategy to detect and stop business fraud before it causes real damage.
Why is business fraud so challenging to solve?
To truly understand how to combat business fraud, it’s important to grasp why it’s so challenging to solve. From our experience supporting hundreds of customers, we’ve identified three key challenges:
Business identity is complex: Business identity isn’t as simple as a single ID — it’s a mix of registration details, ownership data, and operational history, all of which fraudsters can manipulate. The lack of authoritative data sources for things like ownership or website details only makes it harder to verify and detect fraud.
Fraud techniques are evolving: Fraudsters are now repurposing KYC tactics, like fraud rings, synthetic entities, and phishing, to conduct business fraud.
KYB is typically focused on onboarding, rather than the entirety of the business life cycle: KYB is often overly focused on making sure the right business information is collected at onboarding for compliance purposes. While this is crucial, it’s equally important to track how businesses and the individuals behind them evolve throughout their time on your platform — especially to fight fraud.
Announcing our new KYB-KYC solutions to combat business fraud
Today, I’m excited to introduce new solutions designed to help you detect and prevent fraud throughout the business life cycle.
Business verification is essential, but it can’t guarantee fraud prevention on its own. Instead, our approach goes deeper, providing insights into both the business and the individuals behind it using a signals-based approach. Here’s how we’re doing it without creating unnecessary friction for the entities onboarding onto your platform:
Identify business impersonation through holistic analysis
Business impersonation is one of the most common fraud challenges our customers face, whether it’s someone falsely claiming to represent a business or pretending to be an ultimate beneficial owner (UBO). To effectively fight business impersonation, it’s essential to look at the full scope of a business’s identity. This means analyzing not only official details, like registration status and incorporation date, but also the business’s online presence, financial history, and beneficial ownership information.
Many KYB providers focus on just one element, such as Secretary of State data or a business’s website, but the best way to combat fraud is by cross-referencing these signals and ensuring consistency across them. For example, a business may submit valid registration details and UBO information, but if its newly created website doesn’t align with that information, it raises a clear red flag. Examining each element in isolation wouldn't have flagged this inconsistency.
Our approach leverages signals that are typically collected during onboarding, like registration information, business website, and other business documents, and cross-references them in real time. By analyzing a wide array of risk signals, we can quickly flag inconsistencies such as the address on a business website not matching the address listed on its Secretary of State documents.
Product and fraud teams can incorporate these insights in real time by using Dynamic Flow to step up verification or request additional documentation if a certain rule is flagged. This layered approach to verification ensures that teams can catch bad actors while still maintaining a seamless experience for legitimate businesses.
This approach is even extended to our new Chain of Trust feature, which allows customers to verify the relationship between an individual and a business without requiring multiple corporate ownership documents or verifying employment via a separate application. By cross-referencing the digital footprint of the business with the form filler’s information using this method, organizations can prevent business impersonation without causing drop-off during onboarding.
Catch complex fraud rings with link analysis
While impersonation is a common fraud tactic, fraud rings pose a much greater threat due to their scale and complexity. One of the most telling signs of a fraud ring is the reuse of credentials or devices — a pattern frequently seen in KYC fraud. Fraudsters repeatedly use details like TINs or business addresses to create multiple, seemingly separate entities, all connected by the same reused credential. To uncover these hidden connections, you need advanced link analysis.
Graph, our link analysis product, helps customers uncover connections across different properties — even those several hops away — to detect suspicious activity. By automatically incorporating KYC signals, device data, and business-specific information like registration numbers, Graph catches fraud rings that traditional verification might miss. For example, it might reveal that two seemingly unrelated businesses share the same beneficial owner, bank account, or IP address, sparking further investigation from your team.
Customers like GetYourGuide leverage Graph within our KYB solution to proactively spot risk signals such as shared addresses, IPs, or financial behaviors. This real-time analysis empowers their team to detect hidden fraud rings and intervene before fraudulent actors gain a foothold.
While Graph is a powerful means of identifying these fraud schemes, our customizable rules engine lets your teams decide how to act on these findings. For example, you can choose to run Graph silently — minimizing friction for legitimate businesses — and then trigger follow-up actions based on results, whether it's to trigger a case for manual review, step up verification in Dynamic Flow, or decline the applicant outright. This flexibility ensures your team can respond quickly and apply the right level of scrutiny without compromising user experience.
Prevent account takeover through ongoing monitoring of businesses and beneficial owners
Fraud doesn’t stop after onboarding — account takeovers often emerge post-verification. Our platform allows you to detect account takeovers and prevent them before they happen by tracking changes to a business’s and/or beneficial owner's information over time.
Set up automated reverification workflows triggered by events such as lapsed registrations or attempts to change bank account details to stay ahead of potential takeovers. Using the broad range of signals collected during onboarding and reverification, you can better distinguish between legitimate business updates and potential account takeovers using workflow rules tailored to your business. For example, you might find that merchants logging in from a new device are at high risk for account takeover, while a website update might simply indicate a new menu addition.
While many business fraud solutions focus solely on the entity, it’s equally important to reverify the individual account holder to prevent business account takeovers. You can continuously verify the claimed beneficial owner to ensure their identity remains consistent and hasn’t been spoofed via GenAI. By centralizing all of this data within Persona, you create a single system of record for both entity and beneficial owner information, providing clear insights whenever changes do occur.
Business fraud is evolving — your KYB process should, too
While these solutions address today’s most pressing business fraud challenges, we recognize that new tactics will emerge tomorrow. Because our solutions are built on the entirety of Persona’s KYB-KYC platform, you can tackle any fraud risks as they emerge or evolve — whether the risks are focused on individuals or entities.
As we continue to add new signals to our KYB and KYC solutions, we’ll ensure they can be incorporated into your existing fraud prevention workflows and systems. Our goal has always been the same: to help you adapt to emerging risks faster while avoiding costly overhauls to your fraud prevention systems.
If you’re interested in learning how Persona can help with KYB and business fraud, reach out to our team today.