What Is pKYB? Perpetual KYB vs pKYC and Periodic Review

Most compliance teams know when their next review is due.

Fewer know what has changed since the last one.

Perpetual KYB and perpetual KYC are often used as if they mean the same thing. Both are pitched as the move beyond periodic review. They solve different problems. Each starts a review for a different reason, and each sees a different part of the risk.

In short: pKYB, or perpetual KYB, reviews a business when its official registry record changes. pKYC, or perpetual KYC, reviews an individual customer when their own activity suggests the risk has moved. Periodic review, or KYC refresh, re-checks every customer on a fixed date.

Perpetual KYB vs Perpetual KYC: The Difference Is the Trigger

The useful question is not how often a team checks. It is what makes it check.

A periodic review is triggered by a date. Perpetual KYC is triggered by an event in an individual customer’s own activity or data. Perpetual KYB is triggered by a change in a company’s official registry record.

Periodic KYC Review and KYC Refresh: A Schedule Decides

A periodic review re-checks every customer at a fixed interval. For individuals it is often called a KYC refresh or periodic KYC review. For businesses, it is periodic re-KYB. The interval is often annual, and shorter for higher-risk relationships.

FATF Recommendation 10 calls for ongoing due diligence, and FATF’s assessment methodology expects customer information to be kept up to date, with particular attention to higher-risk customers. Neither sets a review interval. Frequency is a risk-based decision for each firm.

It is predictable and easy to evidence. Its weakness is the time in between. The schedule decides when a check happens. Whether anything changed does not.

Consider a counterparty whose majority shareholder sells in month three of an annual cycle. For nine months, the file names an owner who no longer owns the company. Screening runs against the previous owner. The relationship continues as approved.

This is the gap behind the continuous monitoring vs periodic audits debate. Shortening the cycle narrows it. Changing the trigger addresses it directly.

How pKYC Compares: Event-Driven Review for Individuals

pKYC, or perpetual KYC, is the model pKYB is most often compared with. It replaces fixed KYC refresh cycles with event-driven review for individual customers. Instead of re-verifying everyone on a date, a firm reviews a customer when an event suggests the risk has moved.

For a person, those events usually come from the relationship itself. A screening result, a change of details or unusual activity can each prompt a review.

That works for individuals. Some firms extend pKYC to business customers, but the triggers do not transfer cleanly to companies. The most important changes to a business rarely show up in its own behaviour first. They show up at the registry.

What Is pKYB? Change-Driven Review for Businesses

pKYB, or perpetual KYB, applies the same idea to businesses, with a different source of events. For a company, the most dependable event is a filing at the official registry: a new officer, a share transfer, a change of status. That is why we think perpetual KYB has to start from registry data, not from behaviour or self-declaration.

We wanted to measure how often those filings happen. Early findings from the AsiaVerify APAC Corporate Monitoring Index cover 620 companies across seven APAC registries, monitored for about two months. Roughly one in seven recorded at least one registry change. In some markets, the first change appeared within two days.

If one in seven companies changed, six did not. A calendar reviews all seven on the same schedule, whether or not anything changed.

Where the type of change was recorded, more than 60% involved shares, shareholders or major persons. That is where a periodic file is weakest, and where perpetual KYC does not look.

Ownership is also the hardest change to source independently. Shareholder data is gated in many APAC registries. It is filed on each registry’s timetable, in its own language and format. In Hong Kong, for example, a share transfer is generally not filed with the Companies Registry as a separate event. It usually appears when the next annual return lands.

Where Perpetual KYB Fits

This is the problem AsiaVerify’s Perpetual KYB is designed for.

Each company is set up once, and Perpetual KYB then watches its official registry record continuously, until the contract ends or monitoring is switched off. When nothing changes, no change alert is sent. When a change is detected, the callback carries the latest company data and the category of change, such as Ownership, Officers, Status or Address. Each team decides, against its own risk model and regulatory obligations, what each category should trigger.

Perpetual KYB is live in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand and New Zealand, delivered via API. Monitoring is tuned to how each registry behaves. Where a registry does not publish a type of change, we say so, rather than implying coverage that is not there.

One point on scope. A shareholder change at the company you monitor is a signal, not a complete UBO answer. Establishing who ultimately owns and controls the business still means tracing the structure, usually with a fresh UBO report. Monitoring tells a team when that work is worth doing again.

Moving from Periodic Review to pKYB

We see four principles.

1. Keep the scheduled review as the baseline. It still evidences a full check.
2. Let a registry change, not a date, decide when a file is reopened between reviews.
3. Decide in advance what each category of change should trigger. A status change and an address change rarely warrant the same response.
4. Know each registry’s limits. Where ownership is not filed as an event, plan around the annual return.

None of this needs more analysts. It needs a different trigger.

Do You Need pKYB, pKYC or Both?

Perpetual KYB vs perpetual KYC is rarely an either-or choice. Periodic review, perpetual KYC and perpetual KYB each answer a different risk question. The bigger shift is in the question: from how often a file should be refreshed to what evidence should trigger action.

Business risk does not move on a compliance calendar. Ownership changes, officers move, status shifts and filings land when they land. The registry does not wait for the review date.

We think KYB is moving towards earlier decisions based on registry evidence, rather than more frequent checks. Periodic review answers a fair question: was this company what it claimed to be on the day we looked? Perpetual KYB answers the next one.

Who notices first when the company changes?

Explore Perpetual KYB to see how registry changes reach your team between reviews.