Beyond KYC: Why 2026 Demands Know Your Vessel (KYV™)

At a Glance

• Vessel-based deception surged in 2025, including false flags, spoofing, and document manipulation.
• KYC doesn’t account for vessel behavior, movement history, or hidden ownership risk.
• Know Your Vessel (KYV™) is now essential for financial institutions exposed to maritime trade.
• KYV™ combines behavioral analytics, remote sensing, and ownership insights to flag risk early.

KYV™ Is No Longer Optional

For banks, trade finance teams, and risk officers, customer due diligence has long been the cornerstone of compliance. But the events of this year proved that knowing your customer is no longer enough.

The vessels moving your commodities, and the behaviors they exhibit, can quietly expose your institution to sanctions breaches, fraud, and reputational damage.

Welcome to the era of Know Your Vessel (KYV™).

The Hidden Risks Moving Through Global Trade

Across the first three quarters of 2025, Windward tracked a sharp rise in deceptive shipping practices and a growing gap between reported movements and what was actually happening at sea.

• False flagging surged, with over 1,000 vessels sailing under questionable or misleading registries by Q3. These practices aimed to bypass enforcement, obscure ownership, and sidestep operational restrictions.
• False port calls created a web of unreliable documentation, with vessels logging stops they never made, masking sanctioned origins or illicit cargo routes. In many cases, the port call trails were inconsistent with actual AIS and behavioral data.
• GPS spoofing and jamming disrupted verification, impacting more than 24,000 vessels across Q1-Q3. New hotspots emerged from the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden to Russia’s Pacific coast, severely degrading the reliability of standard tracking systems.
• These deceptive tactics increased operational and compliance risk not just for shipping companies, but also for the financial institutions and trade partners involved in global transactions.

These tactics weren’t limited to sanctioned entities. Legitimate counterparties were increasingly caught in the crossfire, with financial institutions, insurers, and trade facilitators unknowingly exposed to deceptive routes, forged documentation, and vessels engaged in illicit behavior.

Why KYV™ Now Belongs in Your Due Diligence Stack

KYC alone won’t detect a vessel sailing under a false flag. It won’t expose spoofed positions hiding a shipment’s true origin. And it certainly won’t uncover ownership structures engineered to evade scrutiny.

That’s where KYV™ comes in – equipping compliance, risk, and operational teams with the maritime visibility needed to assess vessel behavior, verify exposure, and act with confidence.

By integrating KYV™ into your due diligence workflow, your teams can:

• Avoid document-based traps triggered by port call fraud.
• Reduce false positives by pairing entity data with real-world vessel behavior.
• Flag deceptive practices, like loitering near sanctioned zones or sudden changes in voyage patterns, before exposure occurs.

2025 showed the pattern: every time sanctions escalated, deceptive shipping practices evolved to match. In 2026, staying ahead won’t come from reacting – it’ll come from seeing what’s coming. KYV™ makes that possible.

2026: The Year KYV™ Goes Mainstream

As enforcement expands its scope – targeting not just vessels, but their enablers and financiers – KYV™ is becoming the new baseline for maritime compliance.

Windward’s solution delivers more than static lists. It fuses behavioral analytics, ownership intelligence, Document Validation, and Remote Sensing Intelligence to uncover the full picture, verifying vessel identity, confirming actual movements, and spotting red flags before risk enters the books.

Whether it’s verifying a vessel’s reported port call or detecting mismatches between documents and satellite imagery, KYV™ gives institutions the operational clarity to move with confidence, not just meet requirements.

What makes this shift possible is the rise of military-grade Remote Sensing Intelligence, which fuses synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and electro-optical (EO) imagery, with radio frequency (RF) detections, automatic identification systems (AIS), and behavioral analytics to show what vessels actually do, not what their paperwork claims.

This multi-sensor fusion allows KYV™ to expose deceptive patterns that traditional screening misses:

• SAR reveals vessels operating in the dark.
• EO confirms whether a port call, STS transfer, or anchorage event truly occurred.
• RF locates vessels that are transmitting even when AIS is spoofed.
• Behavioral analytics identifies deviations, concealment tactics, and intent.
• Document Validation ties every reported detail back to real-world evidence.

This is why KYV™ is becoming mainstream in 2026, because due diligence now requires the same multi-layered verification used in remote sensing intelligence. Compliance teams need to confirm reality, not rely on self-reported data.

In 2026, institutions that continue to rely solely on KYC will be operating in the dark and remain exposed to risk. KYV™ is how they stay ahead.