---
title: "Know-Your-Business (KYB) data"
summary: "The KYB collection publishes full extracts of company registries and reference datasets — the sources we enrich the main dataset from, also available to use directly."
url: "https://www.opensanctions.org/docs/coverage/kyb/"
date_updated: "2026-08-28"
---

Alongside the main [OpenSanctions dataset](/datasets/default/), we publish the [Know-Your-Business (KYB)](/datasets/kyb/) collection: full data extracts of several company registries and international reference datasets. We use these sources in an [enrichment process](/docs/enrichment/) that identifies companies and people who appear both in the KYB datasets and on watchlists, and copies their additional details and associated entities into the `default` dataset. The full extracts are a side product of that process, but you can also use them directly.

The datasets in the KYB collection are too large to include in the `default` collection, and usually include a majority of entities that have no risk indication. A company register, for example, is overwhelmingly made up of companies that are not sanctioned or subject to regulatory action.

## How the KYB collection differs from the main dataset

The KYB datasets are built for enrichment, not for direct screening, and that shapes how they behave:

- **No deduplication.** The datasets published in the KYB collection are not integrated — different references to the same person or company are left as separate entities.
- **Updated less often.** KYB sources usually refresh once a week or once a month, because their size makes intra-day updates an un-economical proposition.
- **Overlap with the main dataset.** The entities "copied in" by the enrichment process exist in both collections. Inside the `default` dataset, each KYB source is represented by a dataset with the `ext_` prefix that carries the relevant entities — for example [`ext_gleif`](/datasets/ext_gleif/).

Because of that overlap, indexing both collections into the same instance of `yente` requires namespacing to avoid entity ID collisions — see [importing the data into yente](#importing-the-data-into-yente) below.

## What the KYB collection is not

We use the term _KYB_ to summarize the genre of these datasets, but the geographic coverage is **not sufficient to build a global "know-your-business" service.** If your use case requires a global database of company information, consider a data vendor such as [OpenCorporates](https://opencorporates.com/) or [Sayari](https://www.sayari.com).

We expand the KYB collection opportunistically, as we find data sources that cover regions and topics relevant to the core dataset. It is not our ambition to build a comprehensive global companies database — our friends at [OpenCorporates](https://opencorporates.com/) also use open data to build such a product.

## Using the full KYB datasets

The [KYB collection](/datasets/kyb/) contains full copies of company registers and other international reference databases, crawled and exported to the FollowTheMoney data format. Before you rely on this data, **[read and understand the dataset description](/datasets/kyb/)** — it sets out the constraints on using it.

Plan for the size. The KYB collection holds roughly **50× more entities** than the default OpenSanctions dataset, so it needs significant additional processing resources. Data updates in `yente` also take considerably longer, which can delay the availability of fresh sanctions and risk data in the same instance.

### Importing the data into `yente`

To load the KYB data into `yente`, add an additional catalog to your instance's manifest (see also: [custom datasets](https://yente.followthemoney.tech/datasets/)):

```yaml
catalogs:
  - url: "https://delivery.opensanctions.com/datasets/latest/default/catalog.json"
    auth_token: "$OPENSANCTIONS_DELIVERY_TOKEN"
    scope: default
    resource_name: entities.ftm.json

  - url: "https://delivery.opensanctions.com/datasets/latest/kyb/catalog.json"
    auth_token: "$OPENSANCTIONS_DELIVERY_TOKEN"
    scopes:
      - ru_egrul
      - icij_offshoreleaks
      - gleif
    resource_name: entities.ftm.json
    namespace: true
datasets: []
```

Note the `namespace: true` setting: it adds a dataset-specific suffix to the identifiers of every dataset loaded from the `kyb` catalog, so their entity IDs do not overlap with — and overwrite — the entities in the de-duplicated `default` dataset.