A corporate shareholder is never the beneficial owner; it is a branch of the ownership chain you have not finished. Screen it as an entity, multiply stakes down the chain to find effective ownership, trace the branches that can matter, and escalate the ones you cannot resolve.
Identify beneficial owners by reconciling two imperfect lists, the register and the applicant's own disclosure, then testing each person against an ownership threshold and, where nobody crosses it, against control by other means. Verify each person to a depth set by their role.
A registry lookup confirms that a company with that number exists and shows what it last filed. It does not prove the applicant represents it, who really owns it, or that it trades as it says. Each gap needs its own check.
A face-match threshold is a policy choice between wrongly accepting impostors and wrongly rejecting real customers. Set the pass mark from labelled pairs of your own traffic, add a bounded review band just below it, and revisit both as your users and cameras change.
Reading an ePassport chip can prove the data was signed by the issuing state and has not been altered, and with Active Authentication that the chip is not a copy. It cannot prove the person holding the passport is its owner; only a face match against the chip photo does that.
A liveness result produced on the phone is a claim made by a device the attacker may control. Treat it as input, keep the recorded evidence, and re-check that evidence on the server before the result counts.
Gesture challenges suit broad consumer populations and defeat photos and pre-recorded video. Screen-flash challenges add a random colour sequence that a replayed or injected video cannot contain. Use both where the account is valuable enough to justify the extra seconds.
A NIN check confirms a national identity recorded by NIMC; a BVN check confirms an identity enrolled in the Nigerian banking system; a vNIN is a privacy-preserving token for a NIN. Each proves the record exists, and only a live selfie matched to the record photo proves the applicant owns it.
Reading a document tells you it looks genuine; checking the government record tells you the identity was issued. Use the record wherever one exists, and remember that neither proves the applicant owns the identity until a live face is matched to a trusted photo.
A KYC check proves three narrow things at one moment: the identity exists, the evidence for it is genuine, and the person in front of the camera is its owner. It says nothing about intent, and it starts ageing the day it passes.