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Every Business entity has key people — the natural persons legally responsible for or beneficially owning the company. Didit identifies them during KYB and lets you link each one to a User entity for individual KYC.

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Who counts as a key person

RoleDescription
DirectorNamed in registry as a company director
OfficerSecretary, representative, or other registered officer
ShareholderRegistered shareholder (corporate or individual)
UBO (Ultimate Beneficial Owner)Individual who ultimately owns or controls 10/25/50%+ (threshold configurable)
Authorized signatoryPerson empowered to act on behalf of the company
See the KYB Officers and Ownership pages for the full role taxonomy and ownership-chain computation.

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How key people attach to a Business

1

Identified from the registry

During KYB, Didit queries the company registry and extracts all listed officers and shareholders. Each person becomes a key-people record linked to the Business Verification (KYB) session.
2

User-added (customer-filled)

Workflows can include a “Key People” step where the business admin adds people not present in the registry (e.g. UBOs identified by corporate declaration).
3

Aggregated on the Business entity

The Business’s key-people list is the union of registry-extracted and user-added parties, de-duplicated by identity.
Each key person has a source field:
  • REGISTRY — extracted from an official registry.
  • USER — added by the business admin during the KYB flow.

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Linking a key person to a User entity

When KYC is required for a key person (typically UBOs and directors), the party can be linked to a User entity: The link is created when:
  • A User Verification (KYC) session runs for the party using the same vendor_data as the User entity.
  • An analyst manually associates a business party with an existing User.
Once linked, the User’s KYC status propagates to the key people view on the Business.

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Inspecting key people

From the Business detail page in the console, the Key People tab shows:
  • Every party’s name, role, ownership %, source (registry vs user-added)
  • KYC status of linked Users
  • AML screening status per person
  • Associated documents (director ID, UBO declaration)
Programmatically, key people surface inside the key_people_checks[] array of the Business Verification (KYB) session decision, split into two buckets: 
"key_people_checks": [
  {
    "status": "Approved",
    "node_id": "feature_kyb_key_people",
    "registry": {
      "officers": [
        { "uuid": "...", "name": "Jane Doe", "role": "director", "kyc_status": "Approved", "kyc_session_url": "..." }
      ],
      "beneficial_owners": [
        { "uuid": "...", "name": "John Smith", "roles": ["ubo"], "ownership_min_shares": 40, "kyc_status": "Pending" }
      ]
    },
    "submitted": {
      "parties": [
        { "uuid": "...", "entity_type": "person", "name": "Alice Chen", "role": "ubo", "ownership_percent": 35.0, "source": "USER", "requires_verification": true, "kyc_session_status": "Not Started", "kyc_session_url": "..." }
      ]
    },
    "ubo_kyc_summary": { "total": 2, "approved": 1, "flagged": 0, "pending": 1 }
  }
]
  • registry.officers / registry.beneficial_owners — parties discovered via the registry check.
  • submitted.parties — parties the business admin added during the Key People flow (source: USER).
  • ubo_kyc_summary — aggregate UBO KYC progress.
Legacy flat officers[] and beneficial_owners[] arrays remain on the response for backward compatibility one more release. New integrations should consume the two-bucket shape above. See the full KYB response schema for every field.

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Corporate shareholders

When a shareholder is itself a company (not a person), Didit recursively explores the ownership chain to identify the ultimate beneficial owners. Corporate parties can optionally trigger child Business Verification (KYB) sessions. See Ownership structure for a worked example of multi-layer ownership chains.

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Key people webhooks

Changes to key people surface through the parent session events:
  • data.updated (with session_kind: "business") — session data including key people was updated.
  • status.updated (with session_kind: "business") — the session status changed as a result.
See KYB webhooks for payloads.

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Next steps

Officers

Director identification and role taxonomy.

Ownership

UBO, corporate shareholders, and chain computation.

Key People flow

The KYB step that collects key people.