Sumsub has released its European KYB Benchmark Survey 2026, showing how manual business verification is costing European firms clients. Alongside it, the company has expanded its Business Verification suite with automated company-level risk scoring, automated periodic rechecks and corporate document expiry tracking.
The survey, run in Q2 2026 among 154 compliance and risk professionals in banking, fintech and digital assets, found slow onboarding doing direct commercial damage. For almost 60% of businesses, verifying a corporate client takes more than a day. The result: 81% have lost potential clients to onboarding delays, 80% say KYB processes slow business growth, and 59% admit compliance complexity causes customer drop-off during onboarding.
Data quality is the core blocker. Fully 99% of businesses encounter incomplete or unreliable company information during verification, and only 5% have achieved full automation. Automated systems still need humans to resolve disputes, so bad registry data caps how far automation can go.
Risk scoring: What It Means
Sumsub’s new risk scoring engine calculates entity-level risk using custom or preset compliance rules. It aggregates ownership-weighted scores from all associated parties, including UBOs, shareholders and directors, with risks cascading across subsidiaries and parent companies. The scores are visualised inside the corporate structure diagram, turning complex ownership chains into workable investigations.
Fraud sharpens the urgency. Some 65% of respondents report fraud rose over the last year, and 53% encountered KYB fraud directly, driven mainly by document forgery and fake identities of UBOs and directors. Over the next two to three years, 53% expect AI-driven corporate fraud to be their biggest challenge.
“The reality is that KYB is far from fully automated, and industry professionals recognize that AI cannot solve these persistent bottlenecks independently,” said Andrew Novoselsky, Chief Product Officer at Sumsub. “Teams want to automate, but they are blocked by inconsistent data and fraud that moves faster than manual review. We added new risk scoring and continuous monitoring tools to our platform to give teams the framework to make faster, clearer decisions. This allows enterprises to maintain rigorous compliance without losing legitimate clients to onboarding delays.”
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