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Ballerine Documentation

KYB Workflow with External Integrations

This guide will walk you through implementing a Know Your Business (KYB) workflow using Ballerine’s system.

The capabilities that will be showcased can be utilized to:

  1. Create decisioning workflows.
  2. Create and configure rules inside a workflow.
  3. Use external sources as part of a workflow.

We’ll start with a simple onboarding workflow for a company, enriching its data using an external source, and send it to a manual review in Ballerine’s back office. Then, we’ll show you how to adjust the rules for automatic approval, skipping the manual approval step.

Preparing Your Environment

Before we proceed with the workflow execution, we need to set up our environment.

Please follow the installation guide to install all the project dependencies. This guide will walk you through all the necessary steps to get your system ready for running the Ballerine projects.

Once you’ve installed all the dependencies, run the following command to start both the workflow service and the backoffice (case management project):

pnpm run api-flow-example

The api-flow-example is a script that runs two essential services:

  1. Workflow service: Handles the main business logic for workflows, from execution to transitioning between different states.

  2. Backoffice: Acts as the case management system where you can manually review cases, approve or reject them based on the information provided. It will run at http://localhost:5137/. To log in, use the following credentials:

  • Username:
admin@admin.com
  • Password:
admin

With your environment set up and both services running, you’re ready to implement and run the KYB workflow. Let’s proceed to the next section.

Workflow Definition

The workflow we’re going to use is predefined, meaning it is already inserted into the database during the seeding process.

This workflow is defined using a statechart definition implemented under the hood with XState. If you’re unfamiliar with state machines or XState, we recommend reviewing the XState documentation for a detailed explanation.

Here is the complete workflow definition: (See the full file on GitHub Seed Workflow)

{
  "id": "dynamic_external_request_example",
  "name": "dynamic_external_request_example",
  "version": 1,
  "definitionType": "statechart-json",
  "definition": {
    "id": "kyb_example_v1",
    "initial": "idle",
    "states": {
      "idle": {
        "on": {
          "start": "check_business_details"
        }
      },
      "check_business_details": { ... },
      "manual_review": { ... },
      "auto_approve": { ... },
      "auto_reject": { ... },
      "reject": { ... },
      "approve": { ... },
      "revision": { ... }
    }
  },
  "extensions": { ... }
}

Here is the workflow vizualztion in xState visualizer: Alt text

Let’s break down some crucial parts:

  1. State Machine Definition: The core of our workflow is a state machine that defines various states and the conditions for transitions between them. This definition is based on the XState library.
"definition": {
  "id": 'kyb_example_v1',
  "predictableActionArguments": true,
  "initial": 'idle',
  ...
},
  1. Check Business Details State: This state is responsible for making an external call to enrich business data and calculate a fuzziness score for the company name.
{
  "check_business_details": {
    "target": "auto_approve",
    "cond": {
      "type": "json-logic",
      "rule": {
        "or": [
          {
            "==": [
              {
                "var": "context.entity.companyName"
              },
              {
                "var": "response.data.registered_name"
              }
            ]
          },
          {
            ">=": [
              {
                "var": "context.external_request_example.data.name_fuzziness_score"
              },
              0.8
            ]
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  }
}
  1. API Plugins: API plugins allow the workflow to interact with external services. For example, business_data_vendor plugin fetches business data from an external URL.
{
    "apiPlugins": [
        {
            "name": "business_data_vendor",
            "url": "https://simple-kyb-demo.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/mock-data/{api_url}.json",
            ...
        },
        ...
    ]
}

Running the KYB Workflow

Creating a New Workflow Instance

To create a new workflow instance, execute the following curl command:

curl -X POST --location 'http://localhost:3000/api/v1/external/workflows/run' --header 'Content-Type: application/json' --header 'Authorization: Bearer secret' --data '{
  "workflowId": "dynamic_external_request_example",
  "context": {
    "entity": {
      "id": "company_id_22113243",
      "data": {
        "companyName": "ABC Company",
        "registrationNumber": "123456789",
        "legalForm": "Business Services",
        "countryOfIncorporation": "United States",
        "dateOfIncorporation": "2003-05-12T14:36:24.173Z",
        "address": "123 Main Street",
        "phoneNumber": "+1 (555) 123-4567",
        "email": "info@abccompany.com",
        "website": "http://www.abccompany.com",
        "industry": "Innovative Solutions",
        "taxIdentificationNumber": "987654321012",
        "vatNumber": "123456789",
        "numberOfEmployees": 250,
        "businessPurpose": "Cutting-edge Technology",
        "approvalState": "NEW",
        "additionalInfo": {
          "customParam": "customValue"
        }
      },
      "type": "business"
    },
    "documents": [
      {
        "category": "proof_of_address",
        "type": "water_bill",
        "issuer": {
          "country": "GH"
        },
        "pages": [
          {
            "provider": "http",
            "uri": "https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tests/xhtml/testfiles/resources/pdf/dummy.pdf",
            "metadata": {
              "side": "front",
              "pageNumber": "1"
            },
            "type": "pdf"
          }
        ],
        "properties": {
          "docNumber": "1234",
          "userAddress": "Turkey, buhgdawe"
        },
        "version": "1",
        "issuingVersion": 1
      }
    ],
    "api_config": {
      "url": "business_test_eu",
      "special_header": "very_special"
    }
  }
}'

This command creates a new workflow instance, which upon successful execution, provides you with a response containing workflowDefinitionId, workflowRuntimeId, and ballerineEntityId. An example of the response:

{
    "workflowDefinitionId":"dynamic_external_request_example",
    "workflowRuntimeId":"[TAKE THIS VALUE TO THE THE FOLLOWING REQUEST]",
    "ballerineEntityId":"clj6uxa650006ruhvbcfvvhgh"
}

Sending Event to a Workflow

To initiate the workflow, send the start event. This action triggers the data enrichment process.

curl -X POST 'http://localhost:3000/api/v1/external/workflows/[WORKFLOW RUNTIME ID HERE]/send-event' --header 'Content-Type: application/json' --header 'Authorization: Bearer secret' --data '{"name": "start"}'

What Happens Next?

After you send the start event to the workflow, the system moves the workflow to the check_business_details state. In this state, it triggers the external_request_example plugin, which makes a GET request to an external URL to enrich the business data. The plugin also calculates a fuzziness score between the registered business name and the one provided in the input.

The workflow then evaluates several conditions based on the fuzziness score. Let’s take a closer look at one of them:

{
  "target": "manual_review",
  "cond": {
    "type": "json-logic",
    "options": {
      "rule": {
        ">": [
          { "var": "pluginsOutput.external_request_example.name_fuzziness_score" },
          0.5
        ]
      },
      "onFailed": { "manualReviewReason": "name not matching ... " }
    }
  }
}

Here, the workflow checks whether the fuzziness score is above 0.5. If the score is above this threshold, the workflow moves to the manual_review state, and the reason for manual review is set to “name not matching …“.

In case the workflow move to the manual_review state, you can then proceed to the backoffice (http://localhost:5137/) using your login credentials (admin@admin.com, admin). There, you will see the case awaiting your review. You have the power to either approve or reject it based on the information provided. Once you make your decision, the system will notify you of the outcome via a webhook event.

Let’s learn more about how to customize the workflow to suit your specific needs in the next section.

Adjusting the Workflow

Let’s tweak the workflow for automatic approval and for sending updates to your backend on workflow completion.

Setting Up Webhooks

Visit Webhook.site to get your webhook URLs. Replace the url field under the finish_webhook and fail_webhook plugins in your workflow definition with your webhook URLs.

Changing Approval Threshold

By default, the rule we discussed in the Workflow Definition section will auto-approve the business if the fuzziness score is 0.8 or higher. However, you might want to adjust this threshold to be stricter or more lenient based on your needs.

Let’s make the fuzziness score threshold stricter. Change the second condition in the API_CALL_SUCCESS rule from 0.8 to 0.9:

{
  "target": "auto_approve",
  "cond": {
    "type": "json-logic",
    "rule": {
      "or": [
        {
          "==": [
            { "var": "context.entity.companyName" },
            { "var": "response.data.registered_name" }
          ]
        },
        {
          ">=": [
            { "var": "context.external_request_example.data.name_fuzziness_score" },
            0.9
          ]
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

With this change, the rule now reads: auto-approve the business if either the company name provided matches the registered name, or if the fuzziness score is 0.9 or higher. This makes the approval criteria more stringent, requiring a higher match level between the provided company name and the registered name.

Remember to save the changes you’ve made to the workflow definition. Once the changes are saved, you’ll need to restart the services to reflect these changes. Run the command pnpm api-flow-example again in your terminal.

Now, when you send a start event to a new workflow instance, it will follow the updated approval criteria. If the new criteria are met, the workflow will proceed to auto-approval and a webhook will be sent to notify about this decision. This allows for quick notifications of automated decisions, improving the speed of your KYB process.

In the next section, we’ll guide you on how to set up a webhook and receive notifications about workflow state changes.