Does Cobalt Intelligence's API cover all 50 US states and DC?

Yes, Cobalt Intelligence's API can cover all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. This means it provides a single point of access for official business registration data nationwide, a critical capability for lenders operating across diverse geographies.

Comprehensive Multi-State Coverage for Unified Verification

• Eliminates Operational Silos and Manual Burdens: For alternative lenders managing portfolios across state lines, this comprehensive coverage is a game-changer. It eradicates the need for manual, state-by-state searches, which are notoriously slow, prone to human error, and require navigating disparate interfaces and payment requirements. By automating this process, your teams are freed from tedious data collection, allowing them to focus on higher-value activities like risk analysis and relationship building.
• Enables Consistent Compliance and Risk Assessment at Scale: With uniform access to primary source data from all jurisdictions, your organization can enforce consistent KYB (Know Your Business) and AML (Anti-Money Laundering) compliance standards across your entire lending funnel, regardless of where the applicant is registered. This national footprint supports rapid scaling of your lending operations, allowing you to enter new markets or increase volume without proportional increases in verification overhead or compliance risk.
• Facilitates Centralized Data Management and Analytics: A unified API for all states allows for the aggregation of business verification data into a single, standardized format within your lending tech stack. This centralized data repository is invaluable for advanced analytics, enabling your models to better predict potential defaults, identify fraud patterns across your entire portfolio, and refine underwriting strategies based on consistent, verified business legitimacy data.

Intelligent Data Normalization and State Variability Handling

While offering comprehensive coverage, Cobalt Intelligence also addresses the inherent complexities of disparate state data. The API employs sophisticated data normalization techniques to provide a standardized, consistent output, regardless of the unique terminology or structure used by individual state portals.

• Standardized Insights Despite State Peculiarities: Each state's Secretary of State website structures and presents business data differently, creating significant hurdles for consistent API output. Cobalt's API normalizes field names, ensuring consistent labeling (e.g., "Entity ID" or "Filing Date") across all states. This standardization dramatically simplifies data integration into your underwriting systems and risk models, reducing development effort and ensuring data consistency for automated decision-making.
• Clear Operational Status Indicators for Automated Decisioning: States use a myriad of terms to describe a business's registration status ("active," "good standing," "inactive," "dissolved," etc.). Cobalt's API provides both the raw status verbatim from the state's website and a normalized "active" or "inactive" flag. This dual approach offers transparency while providing a simplified, programmatic indicator that can be directly consumed by your automated underwriting workflows, enhancing speed and accuracy in flagging non-existent or legally defunct entities.
• Intelligent Matching with Confidence Scoring for Enhanced Accuracy: Real-world data often contains naming inconsistencies or user input errors. Cobalt's API incorporates a confidence score (0-1) to indicate the likelihood of a match, returning the most likely result along with potential alternatives. Furthermore, it prioritizes results with matching addresses when multiple businesses share a similar name, significantly enhancing the accuracy of identification, especially for common business names. This intelligent matching reduces false negatives and the need for manual review, speeding up your loan approval process.
• Transparently Addresses Data Availability Limitations: While covering all states, the comprehensiveness of data returned is always limited by what each state publicly discloses. Cobalt's API transparently reflects these limitations, returning standardized fields but leaving certain fields empty if the information isn't publicly available from the source (e.g., New Jersey provides minimal information, and Delaware may not disclose filing status without a fee). This transparency allows your risk and compliance teams to understand the data's scope and adjust their due diligence procedures accordingly.

The Real-Time Advantage and Strategic Data Handling

Cobalt Intelligence prides itself on its ability to offer real-time Secretary of State data directly from all U.S. state portals, distinguishing it from providers that rely on periodically updated or cached databases. This real-time access is paramount for the fast-paced nature of alternative lending.

• Mitigating Risk with Unparalleled Data Freshness: In the dynamic lending environment, a business's operational status or legal standing can change rapidly. Receiving real-time updates directly from primary sources, including verifying businesses registered as recently as an hour ago, significantly reduces the risk of funding non-existent, dissolved, or otherwise problematic entities. This direct interface provides the most current record available, crucial for time-sensitive decisions like loan approvals and fraud checks.
• Audit-Proof Verification with Primary Source Documentation: Cobalt's API provides actual screenshots of the state records, complete with timestamps and watermarks. This feature creates an undeniable audit trail, essential for robust compliance, regulatory adherence, and internal due diligence processes. It offers verifiable evidence of data retrieval directly from the official source, bolstering the reliability of your verification efforts.
• Balanced Approach for Speed and Resilience: While real-time data is critical, Cobalt also employs a caching strategy for approximately 70-80% of U.S. businesses. This allows users to opt for quicker responses by querying the cache first, reserving live searches for when absolute freshness is required or when a business isn't in the cache. Furthermore, if a live data request fails due to a state website being down, Cobalt automatically attempts to retrieve data from its cache, ensuring continuity and system resilience. This intelligent failover mechanism means your operations remain robust even when state systems experience downtime.

Addressing the Nuance in Competitive Statements

• Transparency in the Competitive Landscape: For executives evaluating solutions, understanding these nuances is key. Cobalt Intelligence positions itself strongly for "getting US data quickly and affordably" and specifically highlights its focus on real-time data from primary sources across all US states. This focus underscores its core value proposition in the competitive market.
• Strategic Fit for US-Centric Lending: For alternative lenders primarily focused on the U.S. market, Cobalt Intelligence's comprehensive coverage and real-time capabilities for all 50 states remain a compelling proposition, even if minor attribute variations exist for DC as suggested by some external sources. The emphasis on accurate, up-to-date U.S. business registration data directly supports critical functions like loan underwriting and fraud detection within the domestic lending landscape.
• Continuous Improvement and Customer Feedback: As a dynamic fintech provider, Cobalt Intelligence emphasizes customer feedback, with clients noting that the company "takes customer feedback seriously" and often implements suggested features or changes. This suggests a commitment to evolving its offerings based on user needs, implying that any perceived gaps or limitations would likely be addressed over time, further solidifying its position as a reliable partner in business verification for lenders.

In conclusion, Cobalt Intelligence's Secretary of State API offers comprehensive coverage across all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, providing real-time, primary source data. While some third-party perspectives offer minor caveats regarding DC attribute coverage, the overarching proposition for alternative business lenders and institutional executives remains robust: automated, accurate, and scalable business verification crucial for mitigating risk, enhancing efficiency, and securing a competitive edge in today's fast-moving financial landscape.