Relationships

A relationship in BNDRY is a typed link between two entities — the director sitting on a company, the ultimate beneficial owner behind a trust, the natural person who is a customer of a corporate counterparty. Each relationship has a source entity, a target entity, and a relationship type drawn from a fixed list (director of, shareholder of, beneficial owner of, trustee of, customer of, and so on). Relationships are how BNDRY models the connections that AML and KYC work depend on.

Why relationships exist

Regulated compliance work is rarely about a single record in isolation. A KYC file on a company needs the directors and the ultimate beneficial owners. A trust review needs the settlor, the trustees, the beneficiaries, and any protectors. An onboarding for a corporate customer needs the authorised representatives who can act on its behalf. Without explicit links between entities, reviewers would have to piece these connections together from notes and external documents every time.

Modelling these links as typed relationships, rather than as free text, also makes them auditable, searchable, and consistent. A regulator asking "who are the UBOs of this company?" can be answered from the data, not from someone's memory of a phone call. A change to a UBO is a structured event that lands in the audit trail, not a paragraph in a note.

Key properties and sub-types

Each relationship is a small record:

• Source entity — the entity the relationship is attributed to.
• Target entity — the entity at the other end of the link.
• Relationship type — one of a fixed enumeration (see below). The type determines the meaning of the link.
• ID — a stable identifier for the relationship itself, useful when relationships need to be referenced or removed.
• Display name and entity type — denormalised on read so the related entity can be shown in the UI without an extra lookup.

Relationship types fall into a few broad groups. Every type has a forward and an inverse variant, so the link can be navigated from either end.

• Corporate structure — director of, shareholder of, beneficial owner of, ultimate beneficial owner (UBO) of, owner of.
• Trust roles — trustee of, settlor of, beneficiary of, protector of, trust administrator of.
• Commercial connections — customer of, supplier of, authorised representative of.
• Personal connections — family, friend.
• Identity equivalence — same as, used to indicate that two entity records refer to the same real-world person or organisation.

Relationships are directional. "John Smith is a director of Acme Pty Ltd" and "Acme Pty Ltd has John Smith as a director" describe the same link viewed from opposite ends, so BNDRY stores the forward type and exposes the inverse for the other entity. When a relationship is read back, the API offers a few views — basic, partial-target, and full — so callers can ask for just the type and target name, or for richer information about the related entity, depending on what they need.

How relationships relate

Relationships live on entities. They are added, removed, and viewed through the entity service, and they appear in the user interface alongside the entity record they belong to. A relationship is meaningful only insofar as both ends are entities BNDRY knows about; creating a relationship to an entity that does not yet exist requires creating that entity first.

Relationships also shape how other parts of BNDRY behave. A workspace may reference an entity and surface related entities in the workspace sidebar so reviewers can navigate to the directors or beneficial owners without leaving the case. KYB profile generation reads corporate-structure relationships when building the picture of a company. Screening and risk-rating jobs run against the entity record, but the relationships are what tell you which other entities also need to be screened — and what they are to the subject of the work.