What is Corporate Digital Identity (CDI)?
The verified digital profile that empowers regulated financial institutions to establish, manage, and maintain the identity of their corporate clients.
The problem CDI solves
Corporate KYC is broken. Banks still rely on manual processes, fragmented data sources, and insecure email to verify the identity of corporate clients. The result is slow onboarding, frustrated clients, regulatory risk, and lost revenue.
The scale of the problem is significant. According to our 2026 Corporate Treasurer Survey:
How CDI differs from traditional KYC
Traditional KYC was built for a different era. It produces static, siloed records that degrade the moment they are created, requiring costly periodic refresh cycles, manual analyst effort, and repeated client outreach that damages relationships and erodes trust.
Corporate Digital Identity replaces this with a dynamic, automated, on demand profile that is built from authoritative sources, maintained continuously, and designed to integrate directly into the systems banks already use.
| Traditional KYC | Corporate Digital Identity | |
| Data sources | Manual, siloed, point-in-time | Public and private, automated, real-time |
| Profile creation | Hours of analyst effort | Automated in minutes |
| Ownership unwrapping | Manual, error-prone | Automated with UBO hierarchy mapping |
| Audit trail | Fragmented across systems | Full digital audit trail, always current |
| Client outreach | Email-based, repetitive — an average of 5 times per review | Structured, secure, reduced to 2 times |
| Regulatory defensibility | Varies by analyst | Consistent, policy-driven, and auditable |
What a CDI profile contains
A CDI profile is built from public and private data and documents combined into a single, structured, reusable record.
The CDI profile output
Every CDI profile delivers a complete, auditable record containing:
- Company information with a visualized corporate ownership structure, with beneficial owners, PEPs, and sanctions clearly identified
- Original source documents with full data provenance
- Corporate hierarchy mapping
- A full audit trail of all actions taken
- Data attribute lineage for every data point in the profile
CDI profiles are available in multiple formats including PDF, Excel, and as a structured digital record via API, for seamless integration into CLM and CRM systems and AI environments via Model Context Protocol (MCP).
The CDI lifecycle
A CDI is generated through an eight-step automated process, triggered by a new client onboarding request, periodic review, remediation requirement, or a perpetual KYC (pKYC) event.
Click through each step of the lifecycle to find out more.
Who needs CDI
Corporate Digital Identity is relevant to any regulated institution that onboards, manages, or verifies the identity of corporate clients. This includes:
The specific CDI use case, entry point, and Encompass solution will vary by institution type, client volume, and the maturity of existing KYC infrastructure.
Corporate and investment banks
Commercial banks
Challenger banks
Correspondent banking teams
Managed service providers
Regulated firms in legal, accounting, and financial services
Corporates managing KYC relationships with multiple banking partners
CDI in numbers
The impact of Corporate Digital Identity is measurable. Across Encompass deployments and independent research, the evidence is consistent.
Sources: Chartis Research figures are from the Chartis Market Insight Report, Keeping good company — streamlining client onboarding with CDI. Bank-level statistics are drawn from anonymized Encompass client deployments, attributed by product above.
- Operational efficiency
- Financial return
- Quality and compliance
- Client experience
CDI and AI
AI is only as good as the data that feeds it. KYC data collated through manual processes is typically stale, incomplete, and unreliable, which makes using it to power AI solutions both impossible and high risk. Corporate Digital Identity changes that.
CDI provides the structured, governed, and auditable data foundation that AI requires to perform reliably in a regulated environment. At its core, the CDI model is a standardized, traceable representation of every legal entity, connecting data from multiple sources into a single verified version of the truth. It is this foundation that makes AI-driven outcomes explainable and defensible.
Encompass is the global leader in Corporate Digital Identity
EC360 enables fast, accurate identity validation and verification of corporate clients, and a gold standard approach to KYC. The world’s leading banks use Encompass to improve client experience and increase business opportunities through consistent regulatory compliance and risk mitigation.
Learn where EC360 can help your organization
Frequently asked questions
What is Corporate Digital Identity?
Corporate Digital Identity (CDI) is a verified, dynamic digital profile of a corporate entity, created by combining public registry data, corporate ownership structures, original source documents, and private client information. It gives regulated financial institutions a complete, accurate, and always-current view of their corporate clients.
How is CDI different from KYC?
KYC (know your customer) is the regulatory obligation. CDI is the digital infrastructure that fulfils it. Where traditional KYC produces static, manually created records, CDI delivers a dynamic, automated, continuously maintained profile that integrates directly into bank systems and updates in real time.
What does a CDI profile contain?
A CDI profile contains company information, visualized corporate ownership structure, original source documents, UBO identification, PEP and sanctions status, full audit trail, and data provenance for every attribute. See CDI profiles for the full breakdown of outputs and formats.
Why do banks need Corporate Digital Identity?
Banks need CDI because traditional KYC processes are slow, costly, and inconsistent. Manual processes create regulatory risk, damage client relationships, and limit the bank’s ability to onboard new business quickly. CDI replaces this with a structured, automated, policy-consistent approach that improves compliance outcomes and client experience simultaneously.
Which regulations require Corporate Digital Identity?
CDI supports compliance with AML directives including the EU’s Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA) framework, the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) in the United States, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) requirements in the UK, and equivalent regulations across more than 200 jurisdictions globally. CDI is not itself a regulatory requirement — it is the most effective way to meet the identity verification and record-keeping obligations that regulations impose.
How does CDI support perpetual KYC (pKYC)?
Perpetual KYC replaces periodic review cycles with continuous, event-driven monitoring. CDI is the data foundation that makes pKYC possible, providing a real-time, on demand profile that updates automatically when trigger events occur, such as changes in ownership structure, sanctions status, or regulatory classification.
Which financial institutions need CDI?
Any regulated institution that onboards or manages corporate clients needs CDI. This includes global and Tier 1 banks, mid-tier banks, commercial banks, challenger banks, and regulated firms in legal, accounting, and financial services. Corporates themselves also benefit from CDI through EC CoorpID, which enables them to manage and share their own KYC data with banks.
How does Encompass create a Corporate Digital Identity?
Encompass creates CDI through EC360, the leading Corporate Digital Identity platform. EC360 automates the retrieval, collation, and organization of public data from more than 200 jurisdictions, combines it with private client information collected through automated outreach, and delivers a complete, auditable CDI profile in line with the institution’s KYC policy.
What is the ROI of implementing CDI?
According to independent research by Chartis, institutions implementing CDI can expect to offset 57% of costs in year one and achieve 59% incremental efficiency gains by year five, with a 32% reduction in end-to-end onboarding processing time. Individual deployments have demonstrated savings of over $2.5M per year and reductions of time to trade from twelve to seven days.