What if the key to better identity verification, fraud prevention, and compliance was hiding in plain sight? In our latest BEV Break webinar, Middesk CEO Kyle Mack reveals how financial institutions and fintechs can harness the untapped power of web data to transform creditworthiness evaluations and outpace risks.
Here’s a breakdown of the top insights from the session, complete with video highlights to help you dive deeper:
Web data is a new lens for business verification
Traditional data sources, like government filings, provide a nice foundation for evaluating a business, but they only tell part of the story. A more solid approach will bridge the gap with three pillars of data: authoritative (e.g., IRS filings), user-permissioned (e.g., accounting records), and alternative data, such as web data. Web data provides real-time insights into a company’s digital footprint, credibility, and operations, offering a dynamic view of what businesses are doing now—not just what they’ve done in the past.
Specific examples include uncovering a business’s DBA name, fraud signals, verifying headquarters locations, and enriching industry classifications that traditional sources often miss.
📽️ Hear Kyle explain how web data captures dynamic aspects of businesses that authoritative data often overlooks, such as product offerings and operational footprints.
Fraud can be spotted through visible and hidden signals
Fraudulent businesses often leave digital breadcrumbs. Visible signals include things like suspicious product listings, incomplete web templates (e.g., “lorem ipsum” text), strange refund policies, or even ecommerce sites with non-functional checkout processes. Hidden signals, such as the age of a domain compared to the business’s formation date, provide deeper context for identifying risks.
By analyzing these signals together, businesses can uncover synthetic identities and first-party fraud before it causes damage. Real-world examples, like the infamous 30 North Gould address—linked to tens of thousands of high-risk businesses—highlight the importance of web data in spotting these patterns.
📽️ Discover real-world examples of high-risk patterns.
Due diligence automation helps with scale and speed
Manually reviewing a business’s online presence takes time—up to 20 minutes per case. Advanced tools, like Middesk’s web analysis product, slashes these review times while providing deeper insights. Teams can zero in on high-risk and edge cases, reallocating resources to where they’re needed most.
This strategic focus on automation doesn’t just save time—it ensures that reviews are more consistent and scalable, a crucial advantage for businesses managing large customer portfolios.
📽️ Watch Kyle demonstrate how automation can improve efficiency and reduce time-to-activation for onboarding processes.
Continuous monitoring offers a competitive edge
Periodic checks are no longer enough in today’s fast-paced environment. Continuous monitoring ensures businesses stay updated on changes in a company’s online presence, flagging discrepancies and emerging risks in real time.
Middesk is working to make this process more efficient and scalable, leveraging AI to provide ongoing insights without creating false positives or breaking the budget. This approach enables businesses to shift from one-time diligence to continuous oversight, delivering better risk management and decision-making over time.
📽️ Kyle discusses the future of ongoing web data analysis and how it complements traditional data sources to deliver better insights.
Final thoughts
Web data isn’t just a supporting tool—it’s a game-changer for business identity verification. By adopting automated, scalable solutions, businesses can reduce risk, improve accuracy, and focus their resources on the cases that matter most. As Kyle shared, "The goal is to empower teams to make informed decisions faster, without sacrificing precision."
Want to see these strategies in action? Explore our web analysis demo or connect with our team to learn more.
