By Roy Urrico
New York City-based Middesk, a business Identity company, recently announced the launch of Signal, a cloud-based product designed to assess the risk profile of businesses in seconds. Signal’s power emanates from the same capabilities that fuel Middesk's cloud-based business identity platform Verify, which provides a score-based system with instant insights into a business’s legitimacy.
On average, there are 4.7 million businesses started annually in the U.S.; and in 2023 a record 5,481,437 new businesses launched, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Middesk aims to provide instant access to the data, insights, and documents needed to onboard and transact with any business, even new enterprises.
Middesk identity-as-a-service application programming interfaces (APIs) address Know Your Business (KYB) evaluations, credit assessment, and tax registration services, updated in days rather than months. More than 500 customers in the fintech, banking, lending, marketplace, insurance, and payroll sectors use Middesk to help them safely verify, underwrite, and grow their businesses including Plaid, Bluevine, Rippling, and Novo.
"Legacy business verification and risk-scoring processes can be slow, cumbersome and costly. Trust is at the heart of every business relationship and we see business identity verification as the key issue to solve," said Kyle Mack, CEO of Middesk. "The speed, accuracy, and affordability of Signal is perfect for businesses looking for a solution that can be run across the entire customer lifecycle. Our earliest partners have been most excited about using Signal at the top of the onboarding funnel, where getting an instant score of a prospect's risk and legitimacy saves time and money increases profits, and builds relationships with the right businesses."
Middesk’s core product, Verify, provides automated business identity verification throughout the customer lifecycle. Mack explained to Finopotamus that while Verify’s design aims at a more detailed higher risk study, the Signal product is a lighter weight score-based product that abstracts away a lot of the raw data and details. “So, you do not need to become an expert in financial crimes compliance to be able to use the product and make quick, educated decisions about your customer.”
Presenting the Right Signal
Mack further explained Signal's API delivers a composite score made up of a series of reason codes segmented into three main categories: identification (who is this business), verification (is this business legitimate), and evaluation (what is the risk associated with this business). The Signal composite score (scale of 0-100) provides businesses with an indicator of comprehensive risk, allowing them to make informed decisions quickly and efficiently.
Signal can deliver instant and reliable insights without compromising data quality. Within a fraction of a second, financial institutions and businesses can access comprehensive information about the legitimacy and risk profile of a potential partner or customer. It can handle high volumes of verifications quickly while reducing operational costs.
By providing instant, real-time visibility into millions of businesses, Signal empowers financial institutions and businesses to make data-driven decisions with speed and accuracy. Mack said companies like Plaid leverage Signal at the top of their funnel, streamlining their onboarding processes and improving the quality of their partnerships.
Additionally, Middesk's platform now has the ability to identify and flag high-risk addresses by identifying connections to over 40,000 registered agents across the U.S., a common indicator of fraudulent schemes. With this information, users of Signal can better assess risk and ensure the legitimacy of the entities they engage with, improving compliance and reducing exposure to fraud.
This is part of a broader set of Middesk's recently released insights into a business's online presence, including its website, industry, and classification codes such as North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), Standard Industrial Classification (SIC), or Merchant Category (MCCs). When combined, these features provide a comprehensive risk mitigation solution, helping businesses onboard legitimate clients faster, lower operational costs, and scale with confidence.
Credentialing Equals KYB
Mack told Finopotamus, prior to cofounding Middesk (with company CTO Kurt Ruppel), he was on a credentialing team at Checkr doing pre-employment background checks. “Fast forward five and a half years, what we called credentialing at Checkr was what every financial service company was doing for their customer programs, specifically for their business products, KYB. That is what we do now. We build a set of data products that banks, credit unions, lenders, et cetera, use to make high-quality decisions about who their customers are at the point of onboarding.”
Mack continued, “For me, that product is about trying to open the aperture of companies that want to be able to manage risk in a better way. They want to do it in a simple and intuitive manner. So, now we have these two products (Verify and Signal). One is very detailed in the weeds, very risk and compliance oriented.” Verify he noted works great for financial institutions and companies that are more heavily regulated.
Behind the scenes at Middesk, Mack said they work with hundreds of different government agencies at the federal, state and local level to pull together this data platform that represents all the companies that exist in the country today.
For the incumbent companies like Dun & Bradstreet and LexisNexis that Middesk competes against, Mack found that there's huge latency issues with their data products. “The coverage around information on newly formed and small businesses is really lacking.”
Differentiation points from incumbents is that Middesk data is far more accurate, constantly refreshed in days versus months. according to Mack. “That's the primary thing we've been able to help our customers do, is have a better perspective on especially newly formed and small business customers who are just getting their companies off the ground and they're trying to open up a bank account, get a credit card, et cetera,” he said.
How Would Credit Unions Use Middesk?
Mack noted Middesk has nearly 500 customers, with more than 100 financial institutions, including several credit unions and community banks. Middesk offers several options.
Certain organizations, for example, that have the resources work directly with Middesk, and use a dashboard product for their risk and compliance teams to use or build their system, Mack explained. “They will send us information about a new prospective customer. We pull together this report for them in a couple of seconds, and then they can use that report to make a decision on whether they want to open the account for a business, whether they want to request additional documentation or send something (for) manual review.”
Mack said, “We also integrate through a ton of different platforms.” He mentioned banking platforms like nCino, Aperture and MANTL. “We have a network of these partners. Our goal is not to be the system of record necessarily. Our goal is to be the data and insights layer. That has certainly made it a lot easier for some of these credit unions to get up and running on (Middesk).”
There is a huge explosion of entrepreneurship and small business formations as detailed by Census Bureau statistics. Mack pointed out, there is also just a lot of opportunities for financial institutions that offer new types of financial products tailored to new entrepreneurs. “Fintech companies are going after them. There are now embedded finance products in a Square or in a Toast. That is driving a lot of our customers to invest in their digital experiences and really make servicing small businesses a priority.”
Mack suggested, “We just feel that there is this opportunity for banks and credit unions to really look at the tools that they have underpinning onboarding and how they manage risk. We see small business and commercial infrastructure products are way behind.”