Topograph X Forest: From verified register data to actionable KYB workflows

Picture an e-commerce marketplace switching payment providers. The migration means re-onboarding 15,000 merchants across 20 countries, each to be verified under the new provider's licence. No merchant can be locked out during the transition. The compliance team starts pulling data to pre-fill the KYB questionnaires: register extracts from China, statutes from Germany, beneficial ownership filings from France.

That's where it gets hard. Trade is global, but company registration stayed local. Every country has its own register, its own formats, its own access rules. Italy's Infocamere is only open to entities domiciled in Italy. In the Netherlands, access to the beneficial ownership register has been restricted to AML-obliged entities since 2022. Portugal sells its extracts one at a time, behind 12-digit access codes. Some US registers refresh their data every 24 months.

A team building its own integrations faces all of it, country by country. Weeks per jurisdiction, then maintenance forever. And while that's being built, a prospect waiting on verification to open an account is a prospect about to go elsewhere.

Topograph, the real-time source of company data and documents from public registers

That gap is exactly what Topograph's founders saw from the inside. Pierre-Henri Janssens and Hugo Dellinger co-founded 1POINT6, the payments provider built inside BNP Paribas, where getting to company data was a daily problem. Emmanuel Scharff came from Doctrine, where he spent six years industrialising the use of public information for legal professionals. 

Their bet: rather than reselling a database assembled in advance, connect directly to the official registers and fetch the data at the moment it's requested. More than  100 countries covered, a single API. When a client queries Topograph about a company, the answer comes from the register itself, with the official document attached.

That last point matters more than it looks. Every data point returned is linked to the source document it was extracted from, and that document never passed through the end client's hands. In a compliance file, that changes the nature of the proof: a company extract pulled straight from the register couldn't have been altered between two parties, unlike a PDF uploaded by the merchant themselves. A classic document-fraud vector drops out of the process.

And Topograph does only that. No scoring, no onboarding decision, no rules engine. They deliver the data and the document; what happens next belongs to the client. It's a deliberate positioning choice, and it's exactly what makes the partnership with Forest a natural fit.

How Topograph cuts KYB verification time by 70%

For an ops or compliance team, the promise comes down to two numbers. In onboarding mode, Topograph returns a company's data in under 5 seconds, 90% of the time. And their clients report 70% less verification time than their previous process.

A neobank operating in Germany saw its B2B onboarding conversion climb 40% after plugging Topograph in. The mechanics are simple: the less a prospect waits on verification, the less they drop off along the way. KYB, experienced everywhere as a regulatory drag, becomes a conversion lever once it goes from several days to a few seconds.

The other gain is less visible but just as structural: normalisation. A French SARL, a German GmbH, and a Portuguese Lda all arrive in the same schema, with legal forms, director roles, and activity codes mapped to the same international standards. The team handling the file no longer has to know the quirks of 40 registers. It works with homogeneous data, whatever the client's country of origin.

Why Forest and Topograph are working so well together

Forest orchestrates the operations of regulated companies: onboarding, KYC/KYB, monitoring, remediation. In every one of those processes, there's a point where you need fresh, provable company data. Building and maintaining connectors to dozens of national registers is neither our job nor our clients'. It's the barrier Topograph chose to own, so we build on it rather than rebuild it.

Here's where the partnership goes looking for its real value. Today, re-KYB works the same everywhere: a calendar. Every year or every two years depending on risk level, you reopen the file, re-verify everything, and close it again. Most of the time nothing has changed, and an analyst just spent twenty minutes confirming it.

There's something smarter: trigger the re-KYB when the data moves, not when the calendar says so. Take a PSP whose merchant reports a change of beneficial owner. That information updates the PSP's database, and that update can trigger a Forest workflow, which queries Topograph to verify against the official register that the newly declared beneficial owner matches what's on record. If it matches, the file updates and closes without an analyst touching it. If not, it goes to review, with the official document already attached and the discrepancy already flagged.

The shift in logic is real: re-KYB no longer fires because a date arrived, but because a data point actually changed. The analyst no longer re-checks the entire portfolio on a fixed date only to find 95% of files haven't moved. They handle real changes, when they're reported, on the only companies concerned.

That's the direction Forest is heading towards, and one we already deploy with clients through partners like Topograph: operations driven by real data rather than by the calendar. The building blocks exist on both sides, and event-driven re-KYB is precisely one of the processes we're building together today.

Topograph and Forest are already in production together. The integration requires no connector to build on the client side: as soon as Topograph's data lands in the database, Forest reads it natively, like any other data in the system.

From verified data to live operations: how Topograph and Forest fit together

Topograph solved half the problem: reliable, provable company data, available in seconds, across 100 countries. But fresh data landing in a frozen process changes nothing. If every register update ends up in a queue no one prioritises, if every detected discrepancy needs a ticket to adjust the routing rule, the speed gained upstream is lost downstream.

That's Forest's job: making that data flow through workflows the ops and compliance teams pilot themselves, with the permissions, the approvals, and the audit trail the regulator expects. The data says what changed. The infrastructure decides who sees it, who approves it, and keeps the proof of all of it.

If your team still runs re-KYB on the calendar, there's a more dynamic way. Book a demo.

Forest is the operational infrastructure for regulated fintechs. Compliance, ops, and support teams work on your systems alongside your AI agents, under one permission model and one audit trail. On your own infrastructure. Learn more at forest.app.