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AML & Beneficial Ownership

Anti-money-laundering and customer due-diligence workflows start from the same foundation: is this a real, active legal entity, and who is on its official record? BizVerify supplies that foundation straight from the current registry record — the entity’s status and, where a jurisdiction publishes them, its officers and registered agent.

What BizVerify provides — and what it doesn’t

Section titled “What BizVerify provides — and what it doesn’t”

BizVerify returns the official registry record: existence, status, good standing, and the people and agent the registry lists. That is the authoritative first layer of a business AML file.

It is not a sanctions or PEP screen, and the officer list is the registry’s record of officers and directors — not a beneficial-ownership (UBO) determination. Use BizVerify for the entity and registry-listed people, then run those names through your sanctions/PEP and UBO tooling. Keeping the layers separate keeps each one auditable.

Step 1 — Confirm the entity is real and active

Section titled “Step 1 — Confirm the entity is real and active”
import BizVerify from '@bizverify/sdk';


const biz = new BizVerify({ apiKey: 'bv_live_...' });


const result = await biz.verification.verify({
  entity_name: 'Acme Trading Ltd',
  jurisdiction: 'gb',
});


const eligible = result.exists && result.status === 'active' && result.good_standing === true;

A dissolved, revoked, or withdrawn entity should never enter onboarding as a live counterparty. Gating on status and good_standing first means your AML review only spends effort on entities that are actually operating.

Step 2 — Pull the officers and registered agent

Section titled “Step 2 — Pull the officers and registered agent”

Deep verification returns the registry-listed people and the agent for service of process — the names your AML process screens.

const job = await biz.verification.verifyAndWait(
  { entity_name: 'Acme Trading Ltd', jurisdiction: 'gb', verification_level: 'deep' },
  { timeoutMs: 120_000 },
);


const record = job.data;
for (const officer of record.officers) {
  // Feed officer.name into your sanctions / PEP / UBO screening.
}
record.registered_agent?.name;
record.principal_address;

Coverage varies by registry

Section titled “Coverage varies by registry”

What the officer and agent fields contain depends on what each jurisdiction’s registry publishes. Some registries expose a full officer and director list; others publish only the registered agent and principal office. Check the coverage page for what a given jurisdiction returns, and treat an empty officers list as “the registry doesn’t publish officers here,” not as “no officers exist.”

Keep an auditable record

Section titled “Keep an auditable record”

Every deep result carries a jurisdiction_id and, when you fetch it later, a last_verified_at. Persist both so your AML file records exactly which official entity you screened and when. Because the record reflects the current registry state on each request — no stale snapshot — a periodic re-check surfaces a counterparty that has since been dissolved or lost good standing.

Section titled “Related”