What other verification services does Cobalt Intelligence offer?

While Cobalt Intelligence's Secretary of State (SOS) API provides the foundational real-time verification of business registration across all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, a comprehensive due diligence strategy demands a wider array of verification tools. Beyond its core SOS capabilities, Cobalt Intelligence offers a suite of API-driven services designed to provide a multi-layered defense against fraud and enhance underwriting precision.

Here are the other critical verification services that Cobalt Intelligence offers, each presenting a robust proposition for enhancing your lending operations:

1. TIN (Taxpayer Identification Number) Verification API

What it offers: The TIN Verification API is a crucial service that confirms whether the provided business tax ID numbers (such as an EIN) match the registered information with the IRS. This direct validation against the IRS database adds an essential layer of security, safeguarding against identity theft and ensuring the legitimacy of the entity you're evaluating.

• Fortified Fraud Prevention: In an environment where synthetic identities and misrepresented entities pose significant threats, TIN verification acts as a primary gatekeeper. By instantly validating that the applicant's stated tax ID aligns with official IRS records, you significantly reduce the risk of onboarding fraudulent businesses, thereby protecting your capital and reputation. This is particularly vital for preventing losses associated with non-existent or shell companies attempting to secure financing.
• Streamlined Onboarding and Compliance: Integrating this API into your origination workflow allows for automated, real-time cross-referencing of EINs. This automation drastically cuts down manual review times, accelerating the onboarding process while simultaneously bolstering your adherence to stringent Know Your Business (KYB) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations by providing a verifiable link to federal tax records. The speed and accuracy gained free up your compliance teams to focus on more complex cases, rather than routine data validation.
• Enhanced Underwriting Accuracy: Beyond fraud, a verified TIN provides confidence in the legal standing of a business. When combined with SOS data, this multi-source verification allows your underwriting models to assess risk with greater precision, enabling you to offer more competitive terms to legitimate businesses and structure deals with a clearer understanding of the borrower's fundamental identity. For example, 1West integrates Cobalt's SOS data along with credit reports, bank statement data, and Plaid insights to aggregate data and match it against funder guidelines, showing how multi-source verification is critical for intelligent guidance in underwriting.

2. UCC (Uniform Commercial Code) Filing Data Retrieval

What it offers: Cobalt Intelligence's API provides access to Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) filings. This enables lenders to identify existing liens and financial obligations held against a business's assets, offering a deeper insight into its financial liabilities and helping assess the associated risk of extending new credit.

• Uncover Hidden Liabilities and Prioritize Collateral: UCC filings reveal whether a business has already pledged its assets as collateral to other creditors. For alternative lenders, particularly those involved in asset-backed lending, this insight is indispensable for understanding your position in the capital stack and confirming the availability of unencumbered collateral. This proactive identification of existing liens prevents unexpected claims on assets, protecting your investment.
• Comprehensive Risk Assessment: Beyond just identifying liens, reviewing UCC filings provides a broader financial health check of a potential borrower. A high volume of recent UCC filings could signal financial distress or over-leveraging, allowing your underwriting team to make more informed decisions about the borrower's capacity to repay and overall creditworthiness. This depth of information enhances your ability to accurately price risk and structure appropriate lending solutions.
• Expedited Due Diligence for Secured Lending: Traditionally, searching UCC filings can be a time-consuming manual process, varying across jurisdictions. By automating this retrieval, Cobalt's API significantly accelerates the due diligence phase for secured loans. This speed translates into faster loan approvals, which is a critical competitive advantage in the alternative lending space where borrowers often seek rapid access to capital.

3. Court Data Access / Judicial Searches

What it offers: Cobalt Intelligence offers access to court data, with a current focus on New York State and Miami-Dade County. This specialized service allows for judicial checks to identify court cases associated with a business, providing insights into potential litigation or judgments.

• Early Warning for Legal Risks: For lending executives, understanding a borrower's legal standing is as crucial as their financial health. Access to court data, particularly in high-volume commercial jurisdictions like New York and Miami-Dade, can provide an early warning system for ongoing litigation, judgments, or bankruptcy proceedings that might not yet appear on credit reports. Identifying such issues upfront allows you to properly assess potential repayment risks and avoid problematic borrowers.
• Enhanced Due Diligence for High-Risk Deals: While not as universally available as SOS data, court records, where accessible, offer invaluable context for higher-value or higher-risk transactions. Knowing if a business is a frequent litigant or has outstanding judgments against it can significantly influence your appetite for risk and the terms of your lending agreement. This deep dive into judicial history provides a critical layer of scrutiny that differentiates superior underwriting.
• Automated Manual-Intensive Processes: As highlighted by General Merchant Funding, checking court cases manually can be a "lengthy process" that takes "longer to do that than checking the secretary of state manually". Automating this search through Cobalt's API eliminates this tedious and time-consuming manual effort, allowing your teams to focus on interpreting the findings rather than painstakingly collecting the data. This efficiency gain contributes directly to faster processing times and improved operational bandwidth for your lending operations.

4. Contractor License Verification

What it offers: This service is specifically designed to validate contractor licenses at the state level, ensuring that businesses operate with the legally required credentials. It is particularly valuable for lenders operating in the construction industry or financing related businesses.

• Mitigate Industry-Specific Risk: For alternative lenders specializing in real estate development, construction, or related trades, ensuring that a contractor is properly licensed is non-negotiable. Funding an unlicensed contractor not only exposes your firm to heightened operational risks but also potential legal and regulatory repercussions. This verification service directly addresses and mitigates this critical industry-specific vulnerability, safeguarding your investments.
• Enhance Compliance and Reputation: By validating contractor licenses, you ensure that your lending practices align with relevant state regulations, bolstering your overall compliance framework. This proactive approach protects your firm's reputation by demonstrating a commitment to responsible lending and due diligence, which is increasingly valued by institutional partners and regulators.
• Accelerate Deal Flow for Specialized Lending: Manually verifying contractor licenses across various state boards can be a cumbersome and time-consuming process. Automating this step speeds up the underwriting process for construction-related loans, allowing you to deploy capital more rapidly into a specialized, high-demand market. This efficiency provides a competitive edge, enabling faster approvals and a more seamless experience for qualified borrowers in the construction sector.

By offering this comprehensive suite of verification services—TIN/EIN verification, UCC filing data, targeted court data access, and contractor license verification—in addition to its robust Secretary of State API, Cobalt Intelligence provides alternative business lenders and institutional executives with a powerful arsenal for modern risk management. These tools collectively empower you to automate critical due diligence processes, drastically reduce fraud exposure, maintain stringent compliance, and ultimately, make faster, more informed lending decisions at scale.