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In the wake of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) fraud — where hundreds of billions of dollars were siphoned off due to poor verification standards — the need for a trusted, real-time source of business truth has never been more clear.
Markaaz CEO Hany Fam recently sat down with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster to talk about the role Markaaz is playing in transforming how businesses and financial institutions interact, verify, and grow with confidence. The conversation explored why fragmented data systems are failing us — and how a more holistic, permissioned model can change the game.
“The health of a patient and the health of a business should be verifiable,” Fam said. “No one should be able to distort that data.”
Traditional business onboarding and lending workflows often rely on incomplete, outdated, or easily manipulated data. Fraudsters have exploited this weakness for years — using fake entities, forged documents, and inconsistencies across systems to slip through the cracks.
Despite widespread adoption of AI and big data, Fam emphasized a key gap: “What I don’t hear about is making sense of the data.”
That’s where Markaaz steps in.
Markaaz has built a proprietary platform powered by data stewardship — not just aggregation. With data from 65,000+ sources and over 542 million global businesses, Markaaz verifies, ranks, and enriches 198 core data points per company, including non-public information like beneficial ownership and financial indicators.
The result? A “golden record” that evolves dynamically, customized for each relationship and use case — from onboarding to underwriting.
Fam shared how this platform allows both sides of a business interaction to see and permission the same information, adding a layer of transparency and shared accountability missing from most business interactions today.
To show just how powerful this model is, Markaaz back-tested its platform against a list of convicted PPP loan fraudsters. The result: it would have caught every single one — including a single bad actor linked to over 200 sham legal entities.
This kind of real-time detection is made possible by Markaaz’s infrastructure, which can deliver verification responses in under two seconds — or in as little as 200 milliseconds for high-speed scenarios like point-of-sale decisions.
Adoption doesn’t happen overnight, and Fam is realistic about that. But he believes the platform’s real value comes when a trusted third party — a bank, an insurer — introduces a business to Markaaz. Once an enterprise sees the power of a golden record in action, trust becomes systemic.
“This isn’t just a static data file,” Fam said. “It’s a living, contextual record. It gives both sides the confidence to move forward — because they’re looking at the same, verified truth.”
Markaaz verifies 30% more businesses than leading providers. See what you’re missing with our free match rate test.
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