Asian know-your-business (KYB) controls have an uncomfortable blind spot: firms can spend heavily on onboarding, sanctions screening and case management while still making decisions from corporate records that may be weeks or months out of date – and sometimes more.
AsiaVerify CEO Leas Bachatene spoke with RegTech Insight about the KYB challenges for firms with exposure to Asian companies.
“What does making Asia ‘less terrifying’ to do business with mean?” he asks. “What it really means is bringing transparency forward. What we are providing to global organisations is trust.” The company’s role, he says, is to help clients decide “which Asian companies you should trust” by combining verification, due diligence and risk assessment. Bachatene’s argument is not simply that Asian markets are fragmented and multilingual.
At the core, AsiaVerify exists to transform how global businesses connect with Asian merchants and suppliers. Our mission is to remove friction from cross-border commerce by providing automated, trustworthy corporate verification tools – built specifically for Asia.We’re not just offering data – we’re solving the compliance and trust gap that global companies face when dealing with complex, opaque markets in the region.
Founded in Singapore in 2019, AsiaVerify is an intelligence platform that pulls from official sources across 14 Asian jurisdictions, giving users real-time insights into company identity, ownership structure, risk indicators, and compliance status for over 450 million entities – all through a single interface.
Bachatene says AsiaVerify’s largest market is the data and compliance-provider ecosystem : “Our model is to power our partners with Asian data – the information, identity and compliance providers who build it into their broader global products. When they go to market with a global compliance solution, the Asian piece is ours”
Registry Source
AsiaVerify’s value lies in what happens between raw data and real-world use. “We pull from official sources – registry data and AML data – and pass it through a unique process of normalising, structuring and unifying, including the connection and contextualisation of ownership information that most providers can’t easily surface,” he says.
Bachatene’s more challenging claim is that relying on a recognised database is no longer sufficient, noting that firms often buy from established providers because it is “defensible”. But defensible is not the same as current. “We don’t have a database. What we do is the technology that goes and fetches the data from the source. That is the IP,” he says.That process turns fragmented, jurisdiction-specific records into live, translated, unified data ready for consumption – delivered through whichever channel suits the use case: real-time API access, a self-serve portal, MCP or bulk transfer of offline data.
From there, the possibilities are effectively unlimited. Partners, resellers and direct clients build on top of this foundation for everything from instant KYB due diligence and ownership analysis to supply chain risk control, data analytics, sales intelligence and fraud prevention – each one powered by the same underlying layer of clean, structured Asian data.
AI Boundary
AsiaVerify uses AI in its internal operations and in areas such as risk-factor development. Bachatene nevertheless draws a firm line around source evidence: clients need assurance that an official corporate record came from the relevant registry rather than being inferred or assembled by an AI system.
“I’m buying data from you. I want to know that the data I’m buying from you has come from an official registry,” he says. “I want the source of truth.” For official data collection, he is blunt: “We don’t use AI when it comes to that.”
That distinction may be more important to compliance officers than whether a platform uses AI at all. The relevant control question is whether automation preserves a traceable evidence chain back to the official source. AsiaVerify’s position is that AI can help organise and interpret Asian corporate data without replacing registry-derived company, director and ownership records.
The same source-provenance logic underpins AsiaVerify’s perpetual monitoring product. Conventional KYB programmes typically verify an entity at onboarding and refresh the record at defined intervals, creating a potential gap when material changes occur between reviews.
Bachatene argues that this is particularly problematic for high-risk suppliers, third parties and counterparties in Asian jurisdictions.
Change Monitoring
AsiaVerify provides change-driven notifications rather than requiring clients to schedule repeated review cycles. When the registry indicates a director appointment, ownership shift or status lapse, a callback prompts the client to run a fresh report and determine what changed. The control is therefore focused on material changes to the official corporate record, rather than conventional media or sanctions monitoring.
Compliance monitoring has traditionally meant watching for the obvious red flags – negative media, sanctions, PEP status. But real risk often shows up quietly, in the details that never make headlines: a change of director, a new shareholder, a shift in a company’s registered business scope. Perpetual monitoring is about tracking those changes as they happen at the source – the corporate registry itself – so that compliance teams see risk emerging in the structure of a business, not just in the news about it.
The critical requirement is not conventional media or sanctions monitoring, but the continuous detection of material changes to a company’s official corporate record. That means tracking registry-reported updates directly at source, rather than relying on changes captured in a secondary database.
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