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Archway vs. KYC/KYB verification vendors — which do you need?
"KYB platform" means two completely different products depending on which side of the table you sit on. Most searches return verification vendors. Archway is the other half.
The core distinction
Two sides of the same transaction
Verification vendors
Verify your counterparties
Sumsub, Persona, Middesk, Alloy, Trulioo, Veriff, Jumio, Onfido — these platforms help you run KYB/KYC checks on other companies or individuals trying to use your product.
- Buyer: compliance or risk team inside a bank, fintech, or marketplace that onboards counterparties.
- Workflow: collect docs, run checks, score risk, decide to approve or reject.
- Direction: inbound — you are the one asking for KYB.
Archway
Manage your own submissions to them
Archway is for the company being onboarded. When a bank, exchange, or payment processor asks you for corporate docs, UBO disclosures, and questionnaires, Archway is the control plane your compliance team uses to respond.
- Buyer: compliance, treasury, or legal ops inside the company responding to KYB requests.
- Workflow: canonical company profile, counterparty-specific packet generation, disclosure tracking, refresh.
- Direction: outbound — you are the one answering KYB.
Decision framework
When you need which
Use a verification vendor if
- You run a bank, fintech, marketplace, or exchange that onboards counterparties.
- You need to collect docs from strangers at scale and score risk.
- Your regulatory obligation is to know who your customers are.
- You want APIs to pull business verification data into your decision engine.
Use Archway if
- You are the company being onboarded across many counterparties.
- Your compliance team spends hours repackaging the same corporate data for every new bank or exchange.
- You have 10 or more active counterparty relationships with overlapping KYB requirements.
- You need a single canonical record of what was shared with whom.
Side by side
Feature comparison
| Typical KYB verification vendor | Archway | |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Verify counterparties submitting to you | Manage your own submissions to counterparties |
| Primary buyer | Compliance / risk team running KYB on others | Compliance / treasury / legal ops responding to KYB |
| Primary workflow | Collect docs → verify → score → decide | Canonical profile → packet generation → disclosure tracking → refresh |
| Data direction | Inbound (third-party data about others) | Outbound (your data to others) |
| Retention | Your counterparty records | Your own corporate evidence and disclosure history |
| Typical price | Per-verification or API-call based | Seat + entity-count subscription |
Can they coexist?
Yes. They solve different problems.
Many companies run both: a verification vendor to onboard their own counterparties (if they are regulated enough to need one), and Archway to manage their outbound submissions to the banks, exchanges, and PSPs that onboard them.
Archway imports verification results from providers like Persona or Sumsub as evidence in the canonical profile, so the same identity data powers both inbound and outbound KYB.
Take the submitter side seriously
See how Archway manages outbound KYB across every bank, fintech, and exchange from one canonical profile.