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A KYB monitoring platform keeps the business records you hold on brokers, MGAs, coverholders and suppliers current after onboarding. It checks company, regulatory, sanctions and financial data on an ongoing basis, and alerts you when something changes. Without one, your file is accurate on the day you onboard a counterparty and drifts from the truth every week after. That drift is data decay, and it is where audit findings come from.
A completed KYB file is a snapshot. The business behind it carries on trading, hiring, restructuring and, sometimes, failing.
The register you check at onboarding does not stand still either. Companies House figures show 5,479,045 companies on the UK register at 31 March 2026. That total includes 548,411 companies in the process of dissolution or liquidation, around one in ten. If your counterparty list is a cross-section of the market, some of it is already heading for the exit.
Regulation adds its own movement. According to law firm summaries of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023, Companies House made identity verification mandatory for new directors and people with significant control from 18 November 2025. Existing directors were given a transition period that ends in November 2026. Director and ownership records are being tidied up as you read this, which means the record you hold may no longer match the register.
Then there is the conduct side. In its February 2024 review of Consumer Duty implementation, the FCA found that some firms did not share enough information with others in their distribution chain, and that some did not recognise their own place in it. The Duty applies proportionately along the chain, and you are not asked to police every other firm. But you do need to know who sits in your chain and be able to show you looked.
Stale records are a quiet problem. Nobody sees them until someone asks for evidence.
Decay rarely arrives as one dramatic event. It builds from small changes that nobody was watching for. In insurance distribution, the common ones are:
Each is small. Together they mean the file you would show an auditor describes a business that no longer exists in that form.
A good platform watches the same sources a careful analyst would check by hand, but continuously and across the whole counterparty list. Expect coverage of:
Detection is half the job. The platform also needs to alert the right person, in a form they can act on, and keep a record of what was flagged, when, and what was done about it. That audit trail is what turns monitoring into evidence.
REG Network works this way. According to REG, it monitors sanctions changes, credit deterioration, director changes, FCA status changes, insolvency risk, Companies House changes and expired documentation, with alerts delivered by dashboard notification, email and API.
Onboarding KYB answers one question: is this business safe to trade with today? Ongoing KYB monitoring answers a different one: is it still safe, and how would you know if it stopped being so?
Here is the difference in practice.
A firm that relies on onboarding checks alone finds out about a problem when a periodic review comes round, when a regulator or capacity provider asks, or when a claim goes wrong. It is reactive by design. Reviews are scheduled by the calendar, so the gap between a change and your awareness of it is whatever the calendar happens to leave.
A firm with continuous KYB monitoring (sometimes called perpetual KYB) learns of the change when it happens. The review then becomes a decision about what to do, not a hunt to find out what changed. That is the proactive position, and it is cheaper in staff time as well as safer.
None of this makes onboarding checks redundant. You still need a strong first check; our KYB and KYC checklist covers what that should contain, and our page on KYC and KYB checks for insurance shows how it fits into onboarding. Monitoring is what keeps that first check true.
Platforms look similar in a demo. The differences show up in month six, when alerts either help your team or bury it. Test these criteria before you commit.
1. Data coverage. Does it cover the UK sources your counterparties sit in, plus the international ones if you trade across borders? Ask what is missing, not only what is included.
2. Update frequency. How quickly does a change at source reach an alert? “Daily” and “monthly” are very different answers.
3. Alert quality. Look at false positives. A platform that fires on every minor filing trains your team to ignore it. Ask whether you can set thresholds by risk, geography or counterparty type.
4. Audit-ready records. Can you show who was alerted, when, and what decision followed? Export a sample record during the trial.
5. Integration. Check for API access, so alerts can reach the systems your team already uses rather than sit in another inbox.
6. Insurance-specific coverage. Generic KYB tools often miss FCA permissions, delegated authority relationships and TOBA status. Ask how the platform handles each.
7. Ownership of the workflow. Who gets each alert, and what happens if they are away? Unclear ownership is the quiet failure in most manual processes, and software that does not fix it only automates the confusion.
Keep one point in view: no platform removes your responsibility for compliance decisions. It gives your team better information faster. Your team still decides what to do with it.
REG Network is built for insurance firms managing brokers, MGAs, coverholders and other counterparties. A user searches for a counterparty, REG surfaces existing data if the business is already known in the network, and gathers what is missing if not. Results typically arrive within about five minutes. Monitoring then starts automatically, with no separate set-up step.
That matters for data decay because the first check and the ongoing watch use the same record. When a director changes or an FCA status moves, the alert attaches to a file you already hold. Our page on continuous counterparty monitoring sets out how that works across a network.
Here is how REG’s Head of Product describes the shift.
Data decay is not a failure of effort. It is what happens to any record that nobody is watching. Onboarding gives you a true file on day one; a KYB monitoring platform keeps it true on day three hundred. If you cannot say today which of your counterparties have changed directors, ownership or regulatory status since you onboarded them, that is your starting point. Pick ten and check.
A KYB check verifies that a business is legitimate, who owns and runs it, and whether it is safe to trade with. It typically covers company registration, directors and beneficial owners, regulatory permissions, sanctions and PEP exposure, and financial standing. It is usually done at onboarding, then repeated or monitored over time.
There is no single best provider, because the right one depends on what you need to monitor. Judge providers on data coverage, update frequency, alert quality, audit trails and fit with insurance registers such as the FCA Register. Ask each to show how a director change or lapsed permission appears, and how long it takes.
A red flag is any sign that a business or its owners carry more risk than the onboarding file suggests. Examples include a sanctions or PEP match, an unexplained change of ownership, a lapsed FCA permission, overdue filings, a recent insolvency notice, or adverse media about a director.
Refresh frequency should follow risk, not a fixed calendar. Higher-risk counterparties need checks as changes happen, while lower-risk ones may suit a periodic review. Continuous monitoring removes the choice, because the platform checks sources on an ongoing basis and flags changes between reviews. Your documented risk appetite should set the rule.
Former Chief Executive Officer
Paul Tasker was the former CEO at REG Technologies. An insurance market veteran Paul is passionate about disruptive technologies and innovations that can drive growth, reduce risk and enable businesses to thrive.
Compliance visibility issues arise when a firm cannot see its compliance position across counterparties, products and controls in one place, and up to date. Data silos are the most common cause. Records sit in spreadsheets, legacy systems and individual inboxes, and nobody can see the whole picture without asking around.
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