Best AI Agents for KYC and KYB Reviews (2026)

The best AI agents for KYC and KYB reviews in 2026 are Middesk for US business verification, Sumsub for KYC, KYB, and AML across many countries in one platform, Alloy for banks and fintechs that orchestrate many identity data providers, and Footprint or Persona for verifying a business and its owners in one flow. Sardine, Ballerine, and Enigma are strong picks when KYB sits inside fraud, merchant risk, or business data work. Runtime is the AI agent harness for payment and fintech teams: the best fit when analysts still assemble each review by hand from several vendors and internal systems, and you want agents that prepare the case in your own cloud.

We make Runtime, so weigh our pick accordingly; every other entry is based on the vendor's own published materials as of October 2026.

How we evaluated

• KYC coverage. ID documents, liveness, address checks, and AML screening on individuals, run by the vendor or through partners.
• KYB depth. Registry and tax ID checks, international coverage, and UBO and director verification.
• Review agents. Whether the vendor ships an agent or copilot that works the manual review queue, and what data it can see.
• Monitoring. Ongoing checks after onboarding, such as registry changes, new owners, and watchlist hits.
• Deployment and pricing. Vendor cloud, API, or your own environment, and what is actually published.

At a glance

The best AI agents for KYC and KYB reviews

1. Runtime: best for reviews that span several vendors and teams

Best for: fintechs, payment companies, and lenders whose analysts pull a KYB result from one vendor, owner KYC from another, screening hits from a third, and internal notes from everywhere else.

Strengths: Runtime is the AI agent harness for payment and fintech teams. Compliance and onboarding teams build agents from their own review procedure. An agent pulls the registry result, owner verification, and screening hits from your vendors, compares fields across sources and application documents, checks portals with no API through a browser, and drafts a review packet with every discrepancy and its source. Approvals and declines wait for a person in Slack, Teams, or the dashboard. Agents run in your AWS, GCP, or Azure account or self-hosted, on any model, including open-weight models picked for KYC and KYB so PII stays in your environment. A forward-deployed engineer builds the first agents with your team.

Watch out for: Runtime does not sell identity data or run document and liveness checks. You bring your KYC and KYB vendors, and Runtime agents work across them.

2. Middesk: best for US business verification

Best for: B2B fintechs, payment platforms, and lenders onboarding mostly US businesses.

Strengths: Middesk is business identity infrastructure built on 400+ government and authoritative sources. It matches name and TIN against the IRS, searches Secretary of State filings across all 50 states and DC, screens the business and its people against OFAC and other watchlists, and monitors for changes. It also verifies businesses in 30 countries across Canada, Europe, and APAC. Middesk Agents are API-first agents for CIP, CDD, and EDD investigations that resolve OFAC false positives, address discrepancies, beneficial ownership, and operating status, with evidence on every finding.

Watch out for: it is focused on business identity, not consumer KYC. For document and selfie checks on owners it partners with identity providers such as Socure. The CIP agent workflow launched in public beta for existing customers, and pricing is not published.

3. Sumsub: best for global KYC, KYB, and AML in one platform

Best for: fintech, crypto, iGaming, trading, and marketplace companies onboarding people and businesses across many countries.

Strengths: Sumsub runs its own ID document and liveness checks, non-document verification, reusable KYC, KYB with UBO and director verification, AML screening and ongoing monitoring, transaction monitoring, fraud prevention, and the crypto Travel Rule. For KYB it cites 30,000+ data sources across 220+ countries, and an in-house team manually reviews complex corporate documents. Summy AI Copilot summarizes cases inside Sumsub's case management, AI agents filter AML screening false positives and extract KYB document data, and since June 2026 an MCP integration lets outside agents work with Sumsub. KYC pricing is public: Basic at $1.35 per verification ($149 monthly minimum) and Compliance at $1.85 ($299 monthly minimum), with a 14-day trial and 50 free checks.

Watch out for: business verification and transaction monitoring are on the custom plan, so KYB pricing is sold through sales. US registry depth is not its focus. See Middesk vs Sumsub for the head-to-head.

4. Alloy: best for orchestrating many identity data providers

Best for: banks, credit unions, lenders, and fintechs that want control over which data sources run, and in what order.

Strengths: Alloy is an identity and fraud prevention platform that pairs a network of data partners (more than 270 as of mid-2026, including the major credit bureaus) with an orchestration engine and machine learning models. Teams build no-code workflows for KYC, KYB, AML and watchlist screening, transaction monitoring, fraud, and credit decisioning. The AI Assistant, launched in February 2026, summarizes case data and recommends a decision a person can approve, or that teams can set to accept automatically. Perpetual KYB in the UK and Europe re-runs business checks when ownership or registry data changes. Alloy says more than 900 financial institutions and fintechs use it.

Watch out for: the AI Assistant works on the context inside Alloy, and pricing is not published. See Alloy vs Sumsub for the head-to-head.

5. Footprint: best for regulated fintechs that want an investigation agent

Best for: OCC and FDIC-regulated banks, fintechs, and marketplaces onboarding businesses and their owners.

Strengths: Footprint calls itself an AI operating system for compliance and risk. It covers KYC, KYB, bank account linking, a secure data vault, and compliance review. Percy, its agent, runs investigations end to end with cited sources and applies your policies written in plain English, across KYC, EDD, sanctions, and monitoring. KYB pulls Secretary of State filings, detects missing beneficial owners, and shows street view of the primary address. It holds SOC 2, PCI DSS, and ISO 27001, and closed a $25M Series B in September 2026.

Watch out for: it is a hosted platform with vendor-managed models, scoped to risk and compliance. Pricing is not published.

6. Persona: best for KYB plus owner KYC in one flow

Best for: platforms that verify both the business and the people behind it, and want configurable workflows.

Strengths: Persona is identity infrastructure for KYC, KYB, AML, and trust and safety. It unifies KYB with KYC on owners, and its reports include TIN verification, US business registration, watchlists, adverse media, and associated persons. The Business Classification Report returns NAICS codes and an MCC from the business's name and website and flags high-risk industries. Workflows and case management are built in, and Verified Agents help tell humans, bots, and authorized AI agents apart.

Watch out for: full KYB is custom-quoted, and the lighter Business Verification add-on is US-only and excludes classification and owner KYC. We found no named review agent that works the manual queue.

7. Sardine: best for KYB inside a fraud and AML platform

Best for: PSPs and fintechs that want onboarding, fraud, and AML on one platform.

Strengths: Sardine's KYB checks registries across hundreds of jurisdictions for legal existence and tax IDs, with UBO look-through and nominee detection. It lists ten agents, including Business Due Diligence, Doc KYC, PEP Screening, Sanctions Screening, and OSINT Search, which handle adverse media, document checks, and website and social review. Device intelligence, consortium data, and case management are included.

Watch out for: KYB is one module of a broad fraud and AML suite, so you are buying into the wider platform. Pricing is not published.

8. Ballerine: best for merchant KYB at acquirers and payfacs

Best for: acquirers, ISOs, payfacs, banks, and marketplaces where KYB is the first step of merchant onboarding.

Strengths: Ballerine calls itself an AI-native risk intelligence platform for underwriting and monitoring merchants. Product lines cover onboarding (KYB), underwriting, monitoring, and partner oversight, with UBO and high-risk vertical modules. Workforce, launched in September 2026, lets agents own a risk operation end to end, and Policy Fit turns acceptable-use policies into a decision engine. Parts of its stack are open source.

Watch out for: it is built around merchants, not consumer KYC, and it is a young company, founded in 2022. Pricing is not published.

9. Enigma: best for business data with public pricing

Best for: teams that want KYB data through an API they can try today.

Strengths: Enigma is a business data platform built on an identity graph that links brands, DBAs, locations, legal entities, and government records. It covers KYB at application and sanctions and watchlist screening. The Enigma KYB Agent offers chat-based verification, and MCP access is included in the Max plan. Pricing is public: Free, Pro at $20 per month, Max at $200 per month, and custom Enterprise, with KYB Verify at $2.50 per check and watchlist screening at $0.50.

Watch out for: it is a data and verification layer for businesses. We found no consumer KYC, document checks, or case management.

Where Runtime enters the picture

Every vendor above answers part of the question. The analyst still builds the file: the registry result from one vendor, owner documents from another, a screening hit with a slightly different name, and the application PDF. Then they decide which discrepancy matters and write it up. After approval, the same business comes back when monitoring reports a new owner or payment ops holds a payout.

A Runtime agent assembles the file once. It follows your checklist, keeps each discrepancy linked to the original record, and drafts the decision for a reviewer. When a monitoring alert fires later, it reopens the case with full history and pulls processing and payout data that identity vendors do not hold. The KYB and KYC review agent guide walks through building one with Claude Code or Codex, and the Jev guide shows how to triage applications and screening hits before the agent starts.

• No single vendor to depend on. Agents run in your AWS, GCP, or Azure account or fully self-hosted, on your sandbox provider with fallbacks, on Claude, GPT, Gemini, or open-weight models, with harness routing across Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode. Swap a KYC or KYB vendor without rebuilding the review.
• Guardrails you set. Read-only by default, per-vendor scoped credentials, a person signs off before any approval, decline, or restriction, SSNs and card numbers stripped from prompts and logs, and every run recorded for your sponsor bank or examiner.
• Built for teams. Compliance, onboarding, underwriting, payment ops, and support share agents, templates, and one memory, so a business has one record from application to offboarding.
• An engineer, not an account executive. A forward-deployed AI engineer with experience from Hulu's payments team at Disney, Finix, Modern Treasury, and BlackRock maps your review procedure and builds the first agents with your team.

Turn your SOPs into agentsConnect your tools, even legacy onesKeep a human in the loopNo single vendor to depend onOne memory across teamsEvery run is stored

[::]New agent

Create a banking ops agent that handles RFIs, hold-harmless requests, and returns of funds from our partner bank, verifies against our ledger, and drafts replies for my approval.

Describe the agent you want

Agent ready

bank-ops-agent

Tools picked from your prompt

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How to choose

• Most of the businesses you onboard are in the US: Middesk, alone or with an identity provider for owner KYC.
• You onboard people and businesses across many countries: Sumsub. For Latin America and Brazil, see our LATAM KYC and KYB provider guide and Brazil provider guide.
• You are a bank or lender and want to orchestrate many data sources: Alloy.
• You want a business and its owners verified in one flow: Persona or Footprint, with Footprint if you want an investigation agent out of the box.
• KYB is one part of fraud, AML, or merchant risk: Sardine or Ballerine. See also our merchant underwriting roundup.
• You want business data with per-check pricing: Enigma.
• Your analysts assemble reviews by hand from several of these vendors: Runtime, on top of the vendors you already use. See how Runtime works next to Middesk, Sumsub, and Alloy.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best AI agent for KYC and KYB reviews?

For US businesses, Middesk Agents resolve identity questions like OFAC false positives, address discrepancies, and beneficial ownership. Sumsub covers KYC, KYB, and AML globally with Summy AI Copilot. Alloy's AI Assistant recommends decisions on cases inside Alloy. Footprint's Percy runs investigations end to end with cited sources. Runtime fits teams that want an agent to combine these vendors with internal data and prepare the review for a person to sign off.

What is the difference between KYC and KYB?

KYC verifies an individual: ID documents, liveness, address, and watchlist screening. KYB verifies a business: legal existence in a registry, tax ID, operating status, and its beneficial owners and directors. Most KYB reviews include KYC on the owners, which is why vendors like Sumsub, Persona, and Footprint run both in one flow.

How much do KYC and KYB vendors cost?

Sumsub publishes KYC pricing: Basic at $1.35 per verification with a $149 monthly minimum, and Compliance at $1.85 with a $299 monthly minimum. Its KYB is on a custom plan. Enigma publishes plans and per-check credits, with KYB Verify at $2.50 per check. Middesk, Alloy, Footprint, Sardine, and Ballerine do not publish pricing. Runtime is available by request, with a free pilot for approved teams.

Can an AI agent approve a KYC or KYB application?

It should not make the final call on its own. Agents are good at pulling registry records, comparing documents, checking screening hits, and drafting the case with sources. Approvals, declines, and exceptions should stay with authorized reviewers, with a record your sponsor bank or examiner can follow.

Where does Runtime fit next to a KYC or KYB vendor?

Runtime is the AI agent harness for payment and fintech teams. It sits on top of your verification vendors: an agent pulls the KYB result, owner KYC, screening hits, application documents, and your internal data, follows your review procedure, and drafts the decision for a person to approve. It does not sell identity data.