KYC and KYB get written as though they were two programmes, and in most firms below a certain size they should be one policy with two evidence sets. The obligation is the same: know who you are dealing with, hold the evidence, rate the risk, keep it current. What changes is that a company cannot show you identity documents, so the work of knowing it runs through registries and ownership chains instead.
Where they are identical
Both end in the same four facts: identified, rated, approved where needed, reviewed on a date. Both need provenance on every evidence item. Both fail in the same place, which is the review that never happens. If your policy describes those four facts once and then says what evidence each customer type produces, you have one policy and two appendices rather than two programmes competing for the same owner.
Where the work genuinely differs
A person is bounded work. A company is not, until your policy says where to stop: ownership can run through layers, and each layer is another source in another jurisdiction. That single difference is why business onboarding takes several times as long per file in most firms, why it needs an explicit stopping rule, and why business customers benefit far more than individuals from a scheduled review, since ownership changes without anyone telling you.
How to write it so it survives an audit
Name the customer types your firm takes on. For each, state the evidence set at each risk rating. State who approves what. State the review interval per rating. Then keep the files somewhere that enforces the interval rather than relying on the person who wrote the policy remembering it. The difference between a good policy and a working one is entirely in that last sentence.
Questions people ask about kyc kyb
Is KYB just KYC for companies?
Close enough for practical purposes. The obligation is the same and the evidence is different. The one thing not to carry over is the assumption that a check stays true: company ownership changes more readily than a person's identity does.
Should KYC and KYB be separate systems?
Rarely, at the size this site is built for. Two systems mean two review calendars and two answers to the question of how many files are overdue, which is the number you least want to be uncertain about.
Which is harder to get right?
KYB, and not because the rules are harder. It is because the stopping rule is a judgement your firm has to make and write down, and firms that have not written it down make it differently every time.