Coris is modernizing risk infrastructure for the world’s fastest growing SaaS companies and payment facilitators (PayFacs). Our MerchantProfiler product is a critical part of advancing this mission, enabling companies to verify merchants in seconds.

Today we’re excited to announce expansions to our MerchantProfiler’s website, address, and phone metadata offerings. These new attributes will make it even easier for software platforms to securely onboard new merchants.

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SMB onboarding & verification challenges

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) represent over 99% of firms in the United States. Despite their ubiquity, SMBs are still very difficult to analyze and underwrite:

• Messy, unstructured data: Most of the available information used to verify a business’s identity is buried in unstructured data that is difficult to manipulate and make sense of. Historically, software companies serving SMBs have employed large risk teams and triangulated SMB data from multiple sources to manually verify and underwrite these businesses. This leads to large operating costs and can open opportunities for human errors in onboarding.
• Fraud’s getting smarter: Fraudulent actors have gotten more creative over time, especially after COVID. For example, some fraudsters have started developing copycat websites that mimic a legitimate business’s website and submitted these websites as part of an application to open accounts and process fraudulent payments. Traditional risk management tools cannot distinguish between the two websites, allowing this type of 3rd party of fraud to go undetected.

Our existing MerchantProfiler product already helps software companies cut through the data noise by automatically classifying merchant industries using GPT-4, analyzing website attributes, and checking against business registration databases in 46 countries. When our customers asked for even more data, we listened.

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Comprehensive SMB risk attributes

Our additional website, address, and phone metadata act as risk “signals” that alert teams to potential instances of SMB fraud.

‍Website

Make manual website analysis a thing of the past. Now, teams can automatically detect when a website provided by a merchant is a copycat of a legitimate website. In addition, our website metadata can detect when websites contain broken links or non-replaced placeholder content from website builders. We’ve also integrated with ScamAdvisor to flag websites that have previously been reported for scam or fraud, as well as those hosted on servers housing a high number of suspicious websites.

This metadata expands upon the dozens of website attributes already offered through our SiteRating feature. SiteRating screens merchant websites for key risk signals such as stock images, analyzes shipping & payment policies, domain age & status, and more.

‍Phone

Over the past few years, several online services have made it easy to generate phone numbers for specific area codes, allowing fraudulent phone numbers to go undetected. Our metadata catches this type of activity. We conduct a reverse lookup of phone numbers provided by merchants in order to identify the following:

• Registered owner of the phone, and whether that name aligns with any of the individuals associated with the business
• Carrier name, type, and whether they provide disposable or temporary phone numbers
• Line type (landline vs. VOIP): Landlines are typically indicative of more legitimate phone numbers, while numbers using VOIP technology could indicate higher risk

‍Merchant address

We conduct key automated checks on merchant addresses, such as address type classification (residential vs. commercial). In addition, we leverage USPS data to review whether an address has been reported as undeliverable or vacant, and whether an address is registered as a Commercial Mail Receiving Agency (CMRA). CMRAs are typically private mailboxes that individuals or businesses can rent. They do not represent physical storefronts, and businesses are generally prohibited from providing CMRA addresses for KYC purposes. 

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Use cases

These automated business checks cut down business application review times during SMB onboarding in the following ways:

• Reduce manual reviews: Instead of manually looking up information online or on the business’s website, our customers get this information directly through the Coris API or our Fuzio platform. Customers can put onboarding reviews on autopilot - once they set up custom risk rules and thresholds in Fuzio, our platform will screen incoming merchant applications and surface any suspicious cases, significantly reducing manual review caseloads.
• Drive down losses: Manual reviews can invite room for human error. Since our product automatically identifies and flags suspicious attributes, risk teams can catch a higher number of suspicious business applications, driving down losses from downstream fraudulent activity.

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Want to learn more?

We’re constantly improving our platform to become the one-stop-shop for critical merchant risk infrastructure needs. If you’d like to learn more about Coris or get started with Merchant Profiler, contact us.