Business Verification: three registry tiers, priced per country

Ask a compliance team what a business check costs and you will not get a number. You will get "it depends". It depends on whether the registry in that country publishes ownership at all, and whether the chain runs through a holding company somewhere else. So the team budgets for the worst case, quotes the customer a week, and an analyst opens a spreadsheet.

The spreadsheet is the tell. A business check that returns a company profile has answered the easy half: a name and a registration number are a lookup. The humans who own and control the company are the work, and that work is what the quarter-of-a-company threshold in your obligations actually points at. The new Business Verification, our know-your-business (KYB) product line, runs registry checks in 220+ countries across three data tiers, each with a published price per country, and bills you for the tier the registry actually delivered, not the one you asked for.

Key takeaways

• Three registry tiers: Lite ($2.00), Shareholders (from $5.00) and UBOs, the ultimate beneficial owners (from $9.00), each priced per country on a public table.
• You pay for the tier delivered. Ask for UBOs where the registry holds no ownership record and you are billed Lite, with a field on the response saying why.
• Key People is one model: UBOs, shareholders, directors, secretaries and signatories, with corporate layers resolved through the ownership chain.
• Company anti-money-laundering (AML) screening and per-person AML are $0.20 each, a linked identity check on an owner is $0.33, and a company the registry cannot find is $0.75 typed in by hand.

What Business Verification does now

A tier you choose, per country. Lite returns the company's own record: legal name, registration number, country, status, company type, incorporation date, registered address, tax number and the officers. Shareholders adds the direct shareholders, natural persons and corporate entities, with their ownership bands. UBOs resolves the beneficial owners through the ownership chain, with the corporate parent chain.

A price you can look up before you run anything. Every country has a published Lite, Shareholders and UBO price, and most sit at $2.00, $5.00 and $9.00 across Europe, the United Kingdom, the United States and Latin America. A few cost considerably more and the table says so: resolving beneficial owners in Australia is $96.00.

Billing that matches what came back. Every response carries registry_tier_requested and registry_tier_delivered. Ask for UBOs where the registry holds no ownership record and you get the highest tier that country can serve, usually Lite, billed at Lite; a resolved report that names no natural person is billed Shareholders. In the hosted flow, if ownership is still pending at selection you are charged Lite and only the difference when the higher tier lands.

Key People instead of four separate lists. Owners, shareholders, directors, representatives, secretaries and authorised signatories arrive under one model, each with a role tag, and one person can carry several. Corporate owners become layers in the chain rather than a dead end, with nested verification available on the company above. Per role you choose who needs an identity check, which workflow, and whether they may skip. An owner already approved on another company in the same application is linked rather than verified and billed twice.

Screening and documents in the same session. The company is screened against sanctions, regulatory enforcement and adverse media; every person found is screened individually, on the same two-score risk system as user verification. Documents come next: certificate of incorporation, articles of association, shareholder register, or anything else you require. They are asked for by their local names in 103 countries, read with Document AI, and the declared key people are confirmed against what the documents say.

Why it matters

If you are a founder

You can price the check before you build on it. A business onboarding gets a cost per company you can look up per country and defend to whoever asks, with no minimum and no contract. One thing before you budget: the free tier of 500 checks a month covers the core identity features, not business verification, so a company check is billed from the first one.

If you are a compliance officer

The obligation is the people, not the company. A quarter of a company is the beneficial ownership threshold under the European Union's anti-money-laundering directives, the United Kingdom's register of people with significant control, the United States Corporate Transparency Act and Singapore. Tiers make that explicit: you choose the depth per country, and the response says what the registry could prove.

If you are an analyst

The spreadsheet goes away. The ownership chain arrives resolved rather than rebuilt by hand, and an identity check sent to a shareholder abroad reports back onto the business record instead of into a separate inbox. When a registry is down you get a clear kyb_registry_provider_unavailable rather than a silent empty result.

Technical details

The registry is also available as standalone endpoints, one per tier, billed at that country's price:

Most integrations never call those directly: a KYB workflow creates the business session for you, so the call is the one you already make for a user session:

curl -X POST https://verification.didit.me/v3/session/ \
  -H "x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "workflow_id": "your-kyb-workflow-id",
    "vendor_data": "company-123"
  }'

Hosted workflow searches carry no separate search fee. Reports still being prepared return 202 Accepted with fetch_status=pending: keep the request_id, poll the session decision, and the delivered tier is charged once when it resolves. Do not repeat the purchase while it is pending: every new POST creates a separate request. Business Verification is live in the Business Console and the API today.

Use cases

• A marketplace onboarding sellers. Lite where you only need to know the company exists, UBOs where the seller handles money.
• A fintech onboarding business customers. Full chain, screening on every person, linked identity checks on the owners who must be verified.
• A lender assessing a borrower. Ownership, documents and adverse media on one session an underwriter can read.
• An iGaming or crypto operator under a licence. A defensible record per company: who owns it, who runs it, and what they were screened against.

How to integrate with Didit

1. Build a KYB workflow and pick the registry tier per country under Workflows → KYB Registry Check → Countries.
2. Configure Key People: which roles need an identity check, which workflow they get, whether they may skip.
3. Create a session with your KYB workflow_id: Didit makes it a business session.
4. Handle the webhooks: session decisions and registry changes arrive as business webhooks.
5. Review in the Business Console: Approved, In Review or Declined, with document requests and the final call left to a person.

FAQ

What happens if the registry has no ownership data for that country? You get the highest tier that country's registries can serve, usually Lite, billed at that tier. registry_tier_delivered and registry_ownership_status say what happened and why.

What if the company is not in any registry? The applicant types it in. That is a flat $0.75, because the search still ran.

Do I pay twice if I read the report again? No. Selection and any later ownership adjustment count as one registry check, and reading the purchased report does not charge it again.

How much is an identity check on an owner? Standard workflow pricing, $0.33 for the full know-your-customer (KYC) bundle. Company AML and per-person AML are $0.20 each.

Can I keep a company under watch after onboarding? Continuous registry monitoring is coming, at $2.00 per company per year for companies verified at the Shareholders or UBO tier, where the registry supports a watch. It is not switched on yet.

Is there a contract? No. Pay per company, no minimum, no annual commitment, with Enterprise terms for teams that want a service level agreement, data residency or white-label.

Ready to get started?

Read the Business Verification documentation, check what your countries cost, and build a KYB workflow in the Business Console. One API for User Verification, Business Verification and Transaction Monitoring, with Wallet Screening inside it.