Liminal evaluated 86 KYC vendors across product execution, strategic alignment, and market presence, and identified 20 leaders amid shifting enterprise buyer demand.
Sumsub announced it has been named a Leading Vendor in both the 2026 Liminal Index for KYC in Banking and the Liminal Index for Business and Entity Verification (BEV).
The recognition comes as tightening global regulations—including the U.S. Corporate Transparency Act, EU AML Regulation, and UK Economic Crime Act—accelerate the need for banks to overhaul legacy controls. Facing sophisticated identity threats, compliance teams are actively replacing fragmented tools with unified platforms capable of handling complex business verification and continuous risk monitoring.
Liminal's research highlights key findings driving this market shift:
- High Vendor Switching Likelihood: 55% of banks rate a KYC vendor switch as likely in the next 12 months as legacy controls struggle with modern operating models.
- Shift to Perpetual KYC: 98.8% of banks have deployed, are deploying, or plan to deploy perpetual KYC within 12 months.
- Heavy Manual Review Burden: 83% of banks still manually review more than 10% of their KYC cases, with most spending 30 or more minutes per case.
- Preference for Unified Platforms: 87% of surveyed banks in the KYC index and 87.5% in the BEV index prefer a single, broad financial crime compliance platform over specialized point tools (only 11% favor specialized KYB point solutions).
- Expanding BEV Adoption: 60% of business customers now undergo BEV (up from 44% two years ago and projected to reach 62% within two years) as universal entity verification becomes standard.
- UBO Complexity & Operational Challenges: 40% of institutions cite Ultimate Beneficial Ownership (UBO) identification as their single biggest BEV challenge, with 23% pointing to complex cross-border ownership structures as a primary hurdle.
This operational evolution is further compounded by security threats, as 67% of businesses report an overall increase in fraud, with schemes increasingly targeting both individual accounts and corporate structures, according to Sumsub’s Identity Fraud Report 2025-2026.
The Liminal Index is built on primary buyer research. Evaluation criteria and weightings are derived from Liminal's Financial Crimes Compliance Buyer Demand Survey, conducted in March 2026 with 100 practitioners involved in KYC purchasing decisions. To qualify as a Leading Vendor in the KYC index, a company had to clear a minimum product execution score of 62% and a minimum strategy score of 76%.
"Banks are selecting KYC vendors for an operating model most of them have not finished building. Perpetual KYC is now the expectation, 2 in 3 buyers treat synthetic identity detection as a hard requirement, and 55% say a vendor switch is likely within 12 months. The companies named as leaders in this index cleared thresholds set by what practitioners told us they weigh, not by analyst preference." — Travis Jarae, CEO and Co-Founder, Liminal.
"Modern fraud doesn't separate human identity from business entities—and compliance infrastructure shouldn't either," said Andrew Sever, Co-founder and CEO of Sumsub. "Liminal’s research confirms that as perpetual KYC becomes the operating standard and UBO tracking grows more complex, compliance teams can no longer operate in silos. We believe being named a Leading Vendor reflects our commitment to delivering an integrated, AI-first infrastructure that automates screening, perpetual monitoring, and entity verification at scale."
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The 2026 Liminal Index reports are available via the resources below:
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About Liminal
Liminal is the intelligence platform for the companies building and selling identity, fraud, financial crime, and security products into complex and regulated markets. We help you get the decision right, then get there first: where to play, what to build, how to win, what to charge, and where to invest. We give your strategy, product, and commercial teams reach. Your own data covers your customers and your pipeline. Ours covers the buyers who did not choose you. Liminal is built on buyer survey data and a demand-led taxonomy that maps demand to supply at the level of the use case, so you can see where real demand and actual supply meet, and where they don't. Learn more at liminal.co
