Trulioo Debuts AI Agent to Determine Beneficial Ownership

ID verification firm Trulioo has debuted an AI agent to resolve beneficial ownership questions.

The company’s UBO Discovery Agent, announced Thursday (July 23), is part of Trulioo’s larger UBO Discovery capability, which is itself housed with its business risk and know your business (KYB) verification workflow.

“AI is reshaping fraud, making it easier for bad actors to hide, and harder for companies to catch them,” the company said in a news release. “This makes the already tough job of verifying who actually owns a business even more difficult.”

Figuring out a business’s ultimate beneficial owner (UBO) is a continual challenge, the release added, as registry coverage is consistent or in complete.

“Until now, compliance teams attempted to rely on either a slow, manual mix of analysts and research portals, or unverified customer self-certifications,” Trulioo said. “Ultimately, both approaches are highly inefficient and fail to ensure regulatory compliance.”

The company says its new agent provides a better alternative, extending Trulioo’s UBO discovery capability and automating business ownership discovery with governed AI to intelligently reconstruct ownership and close gaps left by registries.

“Registries capture who owns a company on paper. They don’t keep up with how fast that ownership actually changes, and in plenty of markets, they were never built to name a person at all, just the next company in the chain,” said Zac Cohen, chief product officer at Trulioo. “The UBO Discovery Agent exists for the moment a registry runs out of answers.”

PYMNTS Intelligence collaborated with Trulioo on the recent report “How Enterprises Can Build a ‘Know Your Agent’ Defense: Digital Identity Verification in the Age of Bots.”

It found that close to two-thirds of enterprises now say they have lost legitimate customers because identity checks generated too much friction. At the same time, internal teams say onboarding abandonment tied to verification obstacles has jumped above 60%.

The collateral damage is mounting. With AI escalating both identity fraud and defenses at the same time, companies are inadvertently closing real users out of accounts and marking them as suspicious, leaving customers stuck in the type of endless verification loops that cause them to abandon onboarding altogether.

“Systems designed to build trust are increasingly optimized to distrust everyone. In sectors like digital banking, gig economy platforms and online marketplaces, onboarding is the business model,” PYMNTS wrote last month.

“Every additional verification hurdle risks reducing conversion rates. Every failed authentication sequence creates another opportunity for customer abandonment.”