Trulioo has launched an AI agent designed to automate the discovery of ultimate beneficial owners (UBOs) for businesses.

The UBO Discovery Agent aims to address gaps left by inconsistent corporate registries, allowing compliance teams to reconstruct cross-border ownership chains.

Finding the true owners of a business remains a persistent challenge for companies.

Registries across different countries vary in quality and often record shareholders and directors of record rather than the individuals who ultimately control a business.

Ownership data can also become outdated due to filing delays.

In addition, international ownership chains can break when they reach jurisdictions that do not share corporate data. Companies previously relied on manual research or customer self-certification to verify ownership details.

Automating ownership research

The UBO Discovery Agent combines authoritative registry data with Trulioo’s proprietary Business Graph, which is built from more than 15 years of ownership record matching across global markets.

It uses governed artificial intelligence to analyse ownership information across official registries, commercial data providers, legally mandated disclosures and open-source intelligence.

The system provides cited evidence for every ownership determination, allowing compliance teams to maintain a transparent audit trail for regulatory purposes without relying on inferred guesswork.

Early deployments of the tool have increased UBO coverage by 20% to 80% compared with registry-only research.

In markets where registry-only searches return usable ownership data for well under 5% of businesses, Trulioo said the agent has increased coverage above 90%.

“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.

Cohen added that the agent applies jurisdiction-specific logic to research ownership at scale and identifies when it cannot find a defensible answer rather than making assumptions.

Initial deployment

A global social commerce platform is the first enterprise customer to deploy the tool, rolling it out across Malaysia, Vietnam and the UK from July 2026.

According to Trulioo, the product is the first in a planned series of AI agents for its identity, fraud and business risk platform.

These upcoming agents will focus on investigative tasks that compliance teams currently handle manually.

Featured image credit: Edited by Fintech News Switzerland, based on image by starmultikharisma via Magnific