How can I verify a small business in real-time?  

Stop compromising on the verification and decisioning accuracy and speed needed to operate your onboarding flow at scale. Brett Adams, Head of Product at Markaaz, walks you through why Markaaz helps speed up your onboarding workflow 

Historically, small business verification has meant you must choose between traditional business data providers focused on larger businesses or web miners that can take hours to return duplicated results. Now your business can verify small businesses for onboarding quickly and easily with Markaaz’s enterprise services – without compromising. 

Markaaz’s Business Decisioning API Suite and Business Verification API Suite can match your business customer data to any small business in any of our markets, 24/7/365, giving you results in milliseconds. We outperform market alternatives on match rate success, materially reducing false positives and false negatives – on a global scale.   

Combining the agility of our cloud/API-native technology and the Markaaz Directory, our proprietary global database of over 300 million small business records, Markaaz is confident in its ability to provide the customer data your business needs to find – when it needs it.   

“Research shows that bad data can cost companies trillions of dollars per year. How often is your team unsure if they’re looking at the right data and that your data sources matched the applicant during your onboarding flow? That’s where our API Suites save you money and time,” explained Brett Adams, Head of Product at Markaaz.   

At the macro level, IBM estimates bad data costs the US more than $3 trillion per year, while an Experian report based on global data noted that 95% of companies state that bad data undermines company performance.  

The Markaaz enterprise services  

The Markaaz Business Verification API Suite and Business Decisioning API Suite use our unique matching approach to search the Markaaz Directory and return the business result with the best match score whenever your business queries a company. The higher the match score, the stronger the probability that the returned result is the correct business that you are trying to onboard.    

“Our proprietary ability to match and verify several versions of each firmographic field means that our business matching success rate is at a scale that this industry has not yet seen,” stated Adams.    

Your team no longer has to manually decide which is the correct business from a slew of similar-named companies with slight firmographic data deviations. This saves your business the high cost and time of manual verification, adding more database subscriptions to your onboarding workflows, or adding a second-step process to re-verify. The Markaaz verification and decisioning API Suites also materially reduce false positives and false negatives that can cost your business time and lost potential revenue.    

“Most of the companies we speak to are used to spending hours, if not days, just trying to verify customer data. This onboarding roadblock can mean you have lost over 35% of your customers before even beginning to offer them services. Our verification and decisioning API Suites enhance and automate your onboarding workflow,” noted Adams.   

However, while the costs are high for the onboarding business, they can be even higher for small businesses trying to access enterprise services. With incorrect data, small businesses often cannot access the growth services they need, such as a credit card or loan.  

Our technology  

The Markaaz verification and decisioning API Suites and the data platform they access are built in the cloud and can scale with you as your business expands. With the ability to process records in real time, Markaaz drives better onboarding workflows than existing solutions because we have our own data always available in the Markaaz Directory.    

“Many newer decisioning and verification software solutions available today are web miners. These solutions don’t have the data on hand because the cost, expense, and expertise required to set up that data are significant. Rather, their software ‘mines’ the web when a request comes in, or the team creates a company if it cannot be found. This is why it can take hours for a single business to be verified and makes it difficult to scale,” said Adams. “One of our benefits is that our API Suites only have to connect to our Markaaz Directory. You don’t have to create a new company, we already have the company in the Directory, and we will return its MarkaazId, a company-specific ID code, to you.”    

Markaaz’s small business verification model is unique in the market today. It offers matching capabilities and a breadth and accuracy of data that outperforms current market alternatives. Many of these alternatives offer firmographic data and, perhaps, in some cases, light business health data, often with a medium and large business focus. This is more in line with prospecting data than the deep dive needed for verification and decisioning needs.   

The Business Verification API Suite enables enterprises to tap into the Markaaz Directory in real-time to verify small business applicants. With just a few variables, the Business Verification API Suite searches the Markaaz Directory, featuring over 300 million global businesses. It delivers the firmographic data, compliance/AML data, and business health data you need to verify new customers and prospects. This API suite comprises multiple API endpoints. These endpoints can return a customized selection of dozens of data points about the business you are attempting to verify based on your business’s unique needs.    

Enterprises can also use Markaaz’s Business Decisioning API Suite. This Suite applies preconfigured rules across multiple metrics to provide a decision on whether or not a business is a strong candidate for onboarding. It also provides the details behind that decision. The decisioning results are based on the metrics your business sets in real-time. A standardized set of metrics can be configured for each API request.    

Any decision returned from the Business Decisioning API Suite can be audited by requesting the decisioning details so that your team can determine which rules were satisfied and which were not. Decision results can be tailored by editing the parameter thresholds in the Enterprise Dashboard should you have changing business needs or would like to be more strict or less strict with your approval criteria.    

“Both of our low-code business verification and decisioning API Suites are uniquely built with GET and POST request capabilities, so we can help you code and integrate to your systems in a manner that works for you,” explained Adams.    

The Markaaz business verification and decisioning API Suites are the solutions your company needs to onboard more of your qualified target businesses faster and more efficiently, improving time to onboarding, the accuracy of onboarding, and reducing your team’s wasted hours.    

Brett Adams, Head of Product
at Markaaz

Brett brings over 20 years of international experience building, growing, and advising fintech and payments businesses, both big and small.  He has served as an advisor to Fortune 100 banking and payments clients at Marakon and Accenture consulting firms and held US and international finance, business development, sales, and product roles while at Mastercard.  His true passion is product management, and is in his second role as head of product at Markaaz, having also launched a consumer lending service in the US with a prior BNPL start-up.  Brett holds a BA degree from Stanford University, an MSc from the London School of Economics, and received his MBA from Kellogg at Northwestern University.