Beneficial Ownership and UBO Verification
When your customer is a company, the law looks through it to the people behind it. We help you identify and verify the beneficial owners who ultimately own or control your corporate customers.
Look Through the Entity to the People
A corporate customer is never the whole picture. Behind every company are individuals who ultimately own or control it, and the PCMLTFA requires you to identify them. That means finding every person who owns or controls twenty-five percent or more, and understanding the ownership structure that connects them to your customer.
Collecting Is Not Verifying
Many businesses collect ownership information and stop there. The obligation goes further: you must take reasonable measures to confirm the information is accurate, and trace ownership through layered or cross-border structures to the real individuals at the end. We help you both gather and verify beneficial ownership, and document the structure so it holds up under examination.
Ownership Mapping
We map the ownership structure of your corporate customers down to the individuals.
Control Identification
We identify those who control an entity even without owning a quarter of it.
Verification Measures
We build the reasonable measures that confirm ownership information is accurate, not merely collected.
Ongoing Refresh
We keep beneficial ownership current, refreshing it when ownership or control changes.
Ready to Simplify Your Compliance?
Businesses We Support With UBO
We support money services businesses, payment service providers, cryptocurrency platforms, currency exchanges, real estate firms, and the many other reporting entities that onboard corporate and entity customers under the PCMLTFA.
We support banks with program design, oversight, & regulatory examination readiness.
We help credit unions meet obligations proportionate to their membership and scale.
We handle registration, renewals, reporting, & controls FINTRAC expects from you.
We cover Bank of Canada registration alongside your anti money laundering obligations.
We establish what your wallet activity triggers, then build only what applies.
We build compliance around what your product does, before volumes and questions arrive.
We register virtual currency dealers and build the reporting their activity demands.
We support financial institutions across registration, program build, and reporting duties.
Why Businesses Choose Our Approach
Structures Untangled
We trace layered and cross-border ownership to the real individuals, so complex structures never hide who truly controls your customer.
Genuinely Verified
We build verification that confirms ownership rather than trusting a form, the difference examiners look for in your files.
Always Current
We keep beneficial ownership refreshed, so your records reflect who owns and controls the customer today, not years ago.
Serving Businesses Across Canada
We support beneficial ownership verification right across the whole of Canada, from Toronto and Montreal to Vancouver and Calgary, and for foreign reporting entities carrying Canadian obligations wherever they operate.
Let's Talk About Your Compliance Needs
Schedule a Free Consultation
Whether you’re starting a new MSB or need ongoing AML support, our team responds within one business day.
Beneficial Ownership Questions
Clear answers to the questions Canadian businesses ask most about identifying and verifying the beneficial owners of their corporate customers under the PCMLTFA.
What is a beneficial owner?
The individual who ultimately owns or controls a customer entity, typically anyone owning or controlling twenty-five percent or more of a corporation.
Why must we identify beneficial owners?
Because criminals hide behind corporate structures. Identifying the real people behind an entity is a core requirement of the PCMLTFA.
Is collecting the information enough?
No. You must take reasonable measures to confirm the beneficial ownership information is accurate, not simply record what a customer tells you.
What about complex ownership structures?
You must trace ownership through layered and cross-border structures until you reach the individuals who ultimately own or control the entity.
How often must it be updated?
Beneficial ownership should be kept current and refreshed when ownership or control changes, so your records never become outdated.