What specific services does Cobalt Intelligence provide for business verification?

‍1. Core Service: Secretary of State (SOS) API

At the heart of Cobalt Intelligence’s proposition is its Secretary of State (SOS) API, a critical tool for any lender seeking real-time, primary-source business entity data across the United States. This API offers a significant leap beyond traditional, often manual, verification methods that rely on outdated or cached information, directly connecting to official state databases.

• Real-Time Data Retrieval: The paramount feature of the SOS API is its ability to pull data directly from state Secretary of State websites in real-time. This means you can verify businesses registered as recently as an hour ago, dramatically reducing the risk of inadvertently funding non-existent or inactive entities.
  
  
  
  • Enhanced Decision-Making: For time-sensitive decisions like loan approvals and fraud checks, real-time data ensures that every underwriting decision is based on the most current and accurate information available, minimizing exposure to rapidly changing business statuses.
  • Operational Agility: This capability empowers alternative lenders to maintain their agility, enabling quick onboarding of business clients and partners without compromising security or regulatory objectives.
  • Fraud Mitigation: By instantly confirming current operational status, the API helps identify unregistered, expired, or inactive businesses, which are common red flags for potential fraud, thereby curtailing the risk of approving fraudulent credit applications.
• Primary Source Documentation & Audit Trail: Cobalt’s API offers direct access to primary source records, providing not just data, but also timestamped screenshots of the actual state records, sometimes with watermarks. This feature is invaluable for building a verifiable audit trail.
  
  
  
  • Unquestionable Authenticity: Providing screenshots directly from official state portals ensures an unparalleled level of verification, assuring lenders that the information used is directly from the authoritative source.
  • Compliance Certainty: The audit-proof evidence generated by timestamped screenshots is essential for meeting stringent compliance and due diligence requirements, especially when facing regulatory scrutiny.
  • Enhanced Trust & Transparency: For internal review or external audits, having a visual record of the data retrieval moment instills greater confidence in the verification process, highlighting the integrity of your due diligence.
• Comprehensive Business Details: The API delivers a wealth of critical business details essential for a thorough assessment, including entity name, operational status (active, inactive, dissolved), filing date, business start date, entity type classification, principal address, registered agent information, officer and owner details, and historical filings and amendments.
  
  
  
  • Holistic Risk Assessment: Access to this extensive data enables a comprehensive understanding of a business's legal standing and structure, aiding in identifying potential risks that might be missed with less detailed information.
  • Granular Underwriting: Details like business start dates are crucial milestones for funders, with businesses exceeding certain thresholds often qualifying for more competitive loan offers, which the API can instantly verify.
  • Specific Officer Information: For 28 states where it's publicly available, the API can provide officer and owner details, which is vital for verifying key individuals associated with a business and preventing identity theft.
• Intelligent Matching Technology & Data Normalization: Cobalt employs sophisticated algorithms to handle naming inconsistencies and improve match accuracy, returning a confidence score to help users resolve potential discrepancies. Furthermore, it addresses the challenge of inconsistent formatting across states through robust data normalization.
  
  
  
  • Reduced Manual Review: The intelligent matching technology minimizes the need for manual review when there are slight variations in business names or input errors, significantly reducing processing time and human effort.
  • Streamlined Data Integration: Standardized field names and status normalization (providing both raw and "active"/"inactive" flags) simplify data integration into your existing loan management systems and CRMs, regardless of the originating state's terminology.
  • Optimized Accuracy: By prioritizing results with matching addresses when multiple businesses share a similar name, Cobalt's API enhances accuracy, particularly for common business names, ensuring you're evaluating the correct entity.
• Comprehensive State Coverage: The API covers all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, allowing you to query them all in a single request, eliminating the hassle of navigating disparate state portals.
  
  
  
  • Scalability for High Volume: This multi-state coverage, combined with the ability to handle thousands of lookups daily, is critical for organizations processing high volumes of applications, such as 1West, which handles 20,000-22,000 leads and 5,000-6,000 loan submissions monthly.
  • Centralized Verification: Instead of juggling dozens of state integrations, a single API call provides full entity verification across the U.S., returning structured entity data, status, dates, and officer information.
  • Competitive Edge: Being able to verify businesses swiftly across all states gives lenders a significant competitive advantage in a fast-paced market, allowing for quicker responses to applicants.

The impact of the SOS API is clearly demonstrated by Cobalt Intelligence's clients:

• 1West: By integrating Cobalt's SOS API into their Automated Business Lending Engine (ABLE), 1West automated 25% of customer onboarding processes, achieved over 90% data verification accuracy, and significantly reduced loan processing time. This freed up substantial bandwidth for their processing team and helped reduce fraud for their lending partners.
• General Merchant Funding: Automated Secretary of State verification and streamlined judicial searches that were previously lengthy manual processes, saving minutes per application and ensuring they deal with verifiable businesses from the start.
• Bectran: Enhanced fraud prevention by automatically pulling SOS data alongside credit applications, enabling application scoring, providing screenshots for audit trails, and automatically declining inactive businesses for faster credit approvals.

2. Additional Verification Services: Expanding the Risk Assessment Toolkit

Beyond the foundational SOS API, Cobalt Intelligence offers a suite of complementary API-driven services that provide a multilayered approach to risk assessment and fraud prevention, crucial for comprehensive due diligence.

• TIN Verification API: This service confirms whether the provided business Taxpayer Identification Numbers (TINs) or Employer Identification Numbers (EINs) match the registered information with the IRS.
  
  
  
  • Critical Fraud Prevention: TIN verification is a vital step in preventing identity theft and fraud, ensuring that the tax ID number provided by a business matches official IRS records.
  • IRS Compliance: It helps businesses stay compliant with IRS regulations by validating TIN and business name pairings in real-time, minimizing compliance issues.
  • Streamlined KYC/Onboarding: By instantly confirming TIN accuracy, this API significantly speeds up Know Your Customer (KYC) and onboarding processes, cutting verification time from hours to seconds.
• UCC Filing Data API: This API provides access to Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) filings in 11 states, enabling lenders to instantly identify existing liens and financial obligations associated with a business.
  
  
  
  • Deeper Financial Insight: Accessing UCC data offers valuable insights into a business's financial health and existing liabilities, which is essential for assessing the risk of extending credit.
  • Proactive Risk Analysis: By uncovering hidden liens that could affect collateral or repayment priority, lenders can make smarter, more informed credit decisions, preventing costly missteps.
  • Comprehensive Due Diligence: Integrating UCC data with SOS information provides a more complete financial picture, enhancing the overall quality of your risk analysis.
• Contractor License Verification API: Designed to validate contractor licenses at the state level, this service ensures that businesses are operating with the required credentials.
  
  
  
  • Mitigate Legal & Reputational Risk: Doing business with unlicensed contractors can expose lenders to significant legal and reputational risks. This API provides instant confidence in partnerships by confirming licenses quickly.
  • Industry-Specific Compliance: Particularly useful for lenders in the construction industry, it provides an added layer of security and compliance, ensuring funded businesses are operating legally and have necessary credentials.
  • Reduced Non-Compliance Exposure: Real-time verification across supported states helps reduce exposure to non-compliance issues without the need for manual searches.
• OFAC Sanctions Check: This service allows for instant screening of businesses and individuals against the OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control) SDN (Specially Designated Nationals) list.
  
  
  
  • Automated Compliance Workflows: It automates compliance with U.S. sanctions laws, transforming what would be slow, manual screening into an instant process.
  • Real-Time Risk Reduction: Provides match confidence scores and allows review of matches in real-time, significantly reducing risk exposure related to sanctions.
  • Integrated Risk Engine: The service is designed to be easily plugged into your existing risk engine, providing crucial compliance data that is fast, reliable, and compliant.

3. Streamlined Integration and Flexible Pricing

Cobalt Intelligence understands that even the most powerful tools are only as effective as their ease of adoption and cost-efficiency. They emphasize seamless integration and transparent, flexible pricing.

• Effortless Integration: Cobalt uses RESTful APIs with clear, comprehensive documentation and provides technical implementation assistance, making integration straightforward for developers.
  
  
  
  • Rapid Deployment: Clients like 1West reported that the core build for integration took less than a week, enabling a rapid return on investment.
  • Developer-Friendly Resources: Comprehensive API documentation, including endpoint descriptions, request/response formats, authentication methods, and sample code, minimizes development effort.
  • Asynchronous Processing Support: For longer requests or slower state systems, flexible implementation options include callback URLs (webhooks) and long polling, allowing users to submit batches of requests and receive results as they become available without maintaining an active connection.
• Flexible, Usage-Based Pricing: Cobalt Intelligence operates on a monthly subscription model, where you pay for an X amount of credits or lookups. This structure is designed to scale with your needs, offering clear, transparent costs.
  
  
  
  • Cost-Effectiveness at Scale: The cost per request decreases as your volume increases, offering significant discounts for higher usage or annual plans, preventing overpayment during low-traffic periods and rewarding growth.
  • No Hidden Ceilings: Unlike some providers, Cobalt Intelligence explicitly states they "never put a ceiling on it," ensuring you won't face unexpected limits or penalties during periods of high demand.
  • Risk-Free Exploration: Businesses can access the Secretary of State API for free, create a free account with immediate API usage for testing, or schedule a free demo call to explore capabilities firsthand before any financial commitment.

Conclusion: Modern Lending with Cobalt Intelligence

For alternative business lenders and institutional lending executives, Cobalt Intelligence offers more than just data; it delivers a strategic advantage. By providing real-time, primary-source business verification, TIN validation, UCC filing insights, contractor license checks, and OFAC screening, Cobalt's API services empower you to:

• Radically Reduce Fraud & Risk: By instantly verifying business legitimacy, identifying inactive entities, cross-referencing against official records, and flagging potential liens or sanctions, you significantly reduce your exposure to fraudulent applications and bad debt.
• Massively Boost Operational Efficiency: Automation of manual data retrieval frees up your underwriting and compliance teams from tedious tasks, allowing them to focus on higher-value activities and scale operations to handle greater loan volumes without proportionally increasing staff.
• Ensure Ironclad Compliance: Access to real-time, auditable primary source data ensures adherence to KYB, AML, and other regulatory requirements, mitigating compliance risks and offering peace of mind.
• Elevate Customer Experience: Faster, more accurate verification processes lead to quicker loan approvals and a more seamless onboarding journey, even enabling significant self-service for your customers.

Ready to experience the power of real-time business data? Schedule a free consultation today to see how Cobalt Intelligence can automate your business verification processes and empower your lending operations.

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