Coris is building the modern risk infrastructure for leading SaaS and fintech companies. Our customers serve SMB clients worldwide, and our merchant risk management capabilities need to match that geographic diversity. Today, we’re excited to announce our expansion into international markets, starting with the U.K., Canada, and Australia.

‍

The problem

Many of our customers and prospects sell SaaS products and embedded payments services to small businesses in and outside of the U.S. Solutions like Stripe make it easy to offer embedded payments worldwide, but sometimes our customers struggle to manage other pieces of merchant servicing at scale, such as connecting to international business registration databases, automating underwriting, and managing risk across different market contexts. 

A few teams build these risk capabilities in-house, but this can lead to long engineering cycles and expensive resourcing tradeoffs. Meanwhile, third-party solutions have historically fallen short on ease of use and/or truly global coverage for the relevant data. Up until now, there hasn’t been a modern risk management platform that can scale globally with these companies.

‍

Our solution

Coris’s core SMB data and risk monitoring services are now available in each of these markets. This means our customers can automatically access the following merchant information:

• Business registration details across federal and state/provincial databases (where applicable), such as  Companies House in the U.K. and the Australian Business Register
• Online review ratings from global platforms such as Google, Facebook, and Yelp, and country-specific platforms such as Checkatrade in the U.K. and True Local in Australia
• SiteRating, which analyzes the professionalism of a merchant’s website information and provides a risk classification score
• Merchant Real Industry, our proprietary model for classifying a merchant into the most accurate MCC and NAICS codes, powered by GPT-4
• Hundreds of other website attributes, such as the presence of prohibited or restricted keywords on merchant websites

In addition, customers can set up custom rules and alerts to monitor merchant risk in these countries on an ongoing basis. 

‍

‍

Just like in the U.S., Coris’s global merchant data can be easily accessed in one of 3 ways: via API, via file upload in our portal, or by searching for businesses one at a time via Business Search. To use Business Search, customers just need to enter the country, business name, and basic address information (city and state/province, or the postal code). We’ll then provide a list of matching businesses along with a match probability for each business, so that customers can choose the right business before pulling up relevant information.

‍

How we built it

We faced several interesting technical and data-related challenges when expanding internationally. Even though all three countries are majority English-speaking, they format and store information very differently and may leverage different review platforms. This has important implications for Business Search, SiteRating, and our analysis of online reviews. 

For example, addresses in the U.S. always include the state code, but that’s not the case in the U.K. As a result, we had to refactor the search parameters for Business Search so that it could identify a valid U.K. business solely based on postal code and city. Addresses are also formatted differently in each country, so we had to retrain our Natural Language Processing (NLP) models on each unique address format to ensure our automated website scraper would pick them up.

‍

What’s next?

We can’t wait to expand our international coverage to 40 more countries in the next few weeks. This expansion will also include business data coverage in countries across multiple continents and languages other than English. All of this is done to further our mission of empowering SaaS platforms and fintechs to best manage the merchant risk in their portfolio.

If you’re interested in learning more, please contact us.