Equifax, one of America’s three major credit-reporting bureaus, unveiled its latest product offering Monday, OnboardConnect – a commercial solution for B2B transactions and customer onboarding.
The recent tech utilizes Equifax data to help lenders and merchants authenticate new and current business customers for fraud checks, tax identification number checks, anti-money laundering and credit risk checks. According to a release, OnboardConnect was created to eliminate the need for organizations to piece together multiple single-point solutions and manually assess new business account applications.
“The faster pace of business transactions, paired with a shift from in-person to digital interactions, has necessitated quicker and more accurate authentication of prospective business customers,” said William Phelan, General Manager of the Equifax United States Information Solutions (USIS) Commercial business.
“OnboardConnect is designed to provide the insights needed to safely transact at lower cost, while enabling companies and financial leaders to approve more business customers with greater confidence,” Phelan added.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, roughly 4.3 million new business applications were filed in 2020, nearly one million more applications than in 2019.
Equifax collects and aggregates information on over 800 million individual consumers and more than 88 million businesses worldwide. The company has been increasingly using that data to streamline processes for lenders, businesses and merchants.
In October, the bureau enhanced its OneView report with a collaboration from DataX that delivered differentiated data assets beyond just standard credit scores. Because two people with exactly the same credit score can have very different financial profiles and needs, Equifax’s APIs incorporate other data models for businesses to make more informed decisions.
This sharing of data was recently a point of contention for Equifax as Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) pushed the National Consumer Telecom & Utilities Exchange to end the sale of more than 170 million people’s personal data as it was being used by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and similar agencies to pursue or investigate people, the Washington Post reported.