Liminal Insights Report

Liminal Index for Business and Entity Verification (BEV) in Banking 2026

08/31/26

Nearly half of banks expect to switch business verification providers. See which of the 86 KYB providers we evaluated are setting the standard for continuous, compliance-ready entity verification.

Report Overview

Banks now verify more business customers than ever, with median BEV coverage rising from 44% to 60% of business customers in two years. But the process underneath has not kept pace: only 1% of banks complete same-day automated verification, and UBO identification remains the single biggest challenge practitioners face.

The automation story is thinner than it looks. 89% of banks describe UBO verification as fully or mostly automated, yet only about 25% have it automated end to end. The manual work concentrates exactly where registry data is weakest, in layered structures, cross-border chains, and jurisdictions with incomplete filings.

The 2026 Liminal Index for Business and Entity Verification in Banking cuts through that complexity. We evaluated 86 KYB providers across product execution, strategy, and market presence, and identified the 19 leaders, with capability scorecards and analyst notes for each.

Key Takeways:

Entity verification is going universal: banks now verify 60% of business customers, up from 44% two years ago.
Buyers want one platform: 87.5% prefer a broad financial crimes compliance platform over KYB point solutions.
But vendor sprawl is accelerating: the share of banks running 4 or more BEV vendors roughly quintupled year over year.
BEV is absorbing credit decisioning: 85% of banks now treat credit assessment as part of the BEV workflow.
The switching window is open: roughly 49% of banks rate a provider switch as likely.
Automation is the next battleground: it's the fastest-rising purchasing criterion for the next 2 years.

Methodology
The Liminal Index offers a detailed analysis and ranking of leading vendors for specific use cases, leveraging robust data and insights from Liminal’s intelligence platform. Liminal’s research team invites solution providers to participate in a company survey and analyst briefing. It uses a proprietary framework to assess and rank product capabilities based on their relevance to market needs. Liminal’s taxonomy and ontology are central to the Index, which precisely evaluates vendor solutions by buyer demand, product capability, and market presence. Liminal conducts a rigorous survey among buyers in the vendor selection process to identify the most in-demand product capabilities and the most valued product components. Market presence criteria included buyer satisfaction, market penetration, and brand recognition. The Liminal Index was designed to be used to inform go-to-market strategy and execution and provide guidance for solution buyers, specifically:
- Executives in corporate strategy
- Leaders of go-to-market execution
- Practitioners of solution implementation