Borrower Intelligence
Verify the business is real, before credit review.
LendPipe runs Secretary of State checks, web presence verification, address signals, ownership lookups, and adverse-media screening on every borrower automatically — and packages each signal with the source so your team can audit any finding.
Apex Manufacturing LLC
82-1234567
Wisconsin (Domestic)
Status
Active · in good standing
File #
2221318
Registered agent
matches application
Website
apex-mfg.com · live · TLS
Google listing
operating hours visible
Directory listings
1 of 4 — limited footprint
Filed address
matches utility bill
Street view
commercial signage visible
Property class
Industrial — consistent
Beneficial owner
Robert Chen · 100%
OFAC / sanctions
no match
Adverse media
0 hits across 12 sources
What it does
KYB and diligence that runs in parallel, not as a separate workstream.
Borrower verification is the work no analyst signs up to do. It involves jumping between Secretary of State websites with different filing search UIs, Googling the business name and reading the results, opening Google Maps and street view to confirm the address looks like the business it claims to be, checking the business registration against the application package, running an OFAC search, and screening for adverse media. Each step takes a few minutes; collectively they consume an hour per deal, and at most institutions they happen inconsistently — some analysts do them thoroughly, others skip the ones that feel redundant, and the documentation that survives in the credit file is often a screenshot or two. LendPipe runs that verification work in parallel the moment a borrower record is created. The Secretary of State filing is pulled and compared against the application; the business website is checked for existence, age, and consistency signals; the registered address is verified through map and street-view evidence; ownership lookups establish beneficial owners; sanctions screening runs against the right global watchlists; adverse media is scanned across the news sources your institution accepts. Each signal is timestamped, sourced, and packaged into a single report that lives in the deal file. The work isn't "done by AI" — it's done by the same searches your analyst would do, just consistently, and recorded for examiner review.
Capabilities
What the borrower intelligence surface covers
Secretary of State filing verification
Filing pulled from the state of registration. Status (active, dissolved, delinquent), file number, formation date, registered agent, and authorized officers compared against the application.
Web presence and consistency
Business website checked for existence, age, content alignment with the application, TLS configuration, and operating hours. Google business listing pulled when available. Directory and review presence quantified.
Address and operations verification
Filed address compared to utility bills, lease documents, and street-view imagery. Property class (commercial, residential, industrial) checked for consistency with the business type.
Beneficial ownership lookup
Ownership chain established from filings, application disclosures, and the CTA/FinCEN beneficial-owner registry where the borrower is in scope. Disclosed ownership matched against external sources.
Sanctions and adverse-media screening
OFAC, EU, UK, and UN sanctions lists checked at the entity and beneficial-owner level. Adverse media scanned across news sources, regulatory enforcement databases, and court records.
Every signal sourced
Each finding carries a citation to the source — SOS filing URL, the news article, the street-view image, the OFAC record. Examiner review and committee questions answered without going back to the borrower.
How it works
From application to verified borrower in four steps
- 01
Borrower record created
When a deal arrives — by email, embedded form, or API — a borrower record is created from the application data. Legal name, EIN, registered address, beneficial-owner disclosures, and state of formation are captured. Diligence searches kick off in parallel with spreading and bank statement analysis.
- 02
External searches run in parallel
Secretary of State, web presence, map and street-view, ownership registries, OFAC, sanctions watchlists, and adverse-media searches run concurrently. Searches that depend on findings from other searches — for example, beneficial-owner sanctions screening — wait for their inputs and run as soon as they're available.
- 03
Signals normalized and matched
Each search returns raw data — a SOS filing record, a Google listing, an OFAC entry. The signal layer matches that data against the application: does the SOS-registered agent match the application's disclosure? Is the filing date consistent with the borrower's claimed operating history? Are the disclosed owners present in the registry? Each match produces a structured finding.
- 04
Report assembled with verdicts and evidence
Findings are organized into the four standard sections — filings, web, address, ownership — each with a verdict (match, review, flag) and the supporting evidence. The summary panel shows verified sections, flagged sections, and the count of supporting sources. The report is attached to the deal and made available to the credit memo drafting layer.
What you get back
What lands in the credit file
Borrower intelligence report
Structured report with verification verdicts for each category — filings, web, address, ownership, sanctions, adverse media — and the supporting evidence for every signal.
Source-cited findings
Every finding carries a link or attached document — the SOS filing URL, the screenshot of the directory listing, the OFAC record, the adverse-media article. Reproducible months later.
Risk flags routed to credit memo
Flags identified during diligence — limited web footprint, address inconsistency, adverse-media hit — are routed into the credit memo's risk section as inputs the analyst can evaluate.
Audit trail
Examiner-ready record of which searches ran, when they ran, what sources they checked, and what they found. Reproducible exactly six months or six years later when the file is reviewed.
Built for lenders
Diligence sized for community bank and credit union deal volumes
Borrower diligence at a community bank or credit union is constrained by analyst time, not by the availability of external data. Every analyst can in theory check the SOS, run an OFAC search, and scan for adverse media — but doing it consistently across every deal, documenting it consistently, and having the documentation survive in a form examiners can review years later is the part that breaks down. Most institutions end up with thorough diligence on some deals and thin diligence on others, driven less by risk and more by which analyst happened to handle the deal. LendPipe makes the same searches happen on every deal, the same way, with the same documentation. The verification quality doesn't depend on which analyst is on duty. The examiner pulls the file three years later and sees the same structured report on every deal in the sample. For SBA lenders and credit unions where consistent diligence is a regulatory expectation and a portfolio-quality lever, that consistency is the product.
Common questions
What lenders ask before they switch
Does this replace our existing OFAC and KYC tooling?
It depends on what you have today. Banks with dedicated OFAC screening tools and BSA/AML programs typically keep those for the regulatory-required compliance screening and use LendPipe's borrower intelligence for the underwriting-stage diligence — KYB verification, web presence, address signals, adverse media. Credit unions and smaller lenders without a separate OFAC platform can use LendPipe's sanctions screening as their primary tool, including the OFAC, EU, UK, and UN watchlists. The choice is configured at the institution level.
How current is the Secretary of State data?
Filings are pulled directly from the state's filing system at the time of the diligence run, not from a cached third-party database. The data is as current as the state's own system. If the borrower has filed in the last 24 hours, the new filing is reflected; if the state's online filing system is itself behind by a week, the LendPipe report shows the same currency the state shows. The retrieval timestamp is included in the report so examiner review can verify when the data was pulled.
What about complex ownership structures with multiple layers of LLCs?
Beneficial-owner identification walks the ownership chain from the application disclosures and the filings of the named owners until it reaches natural persons or hits a layer that requires manual completion. Where the borrower is in scope for the FinCEN Beneficial Ownership Information rule, the BOI registry is checked. Where chains run through entities in non-disclosing jurisdictions, the report flags the gap for analyst follow-up rather than pretending it's complete.
How are adverse-media hits surfaced — do we get every news mention?
No — surfacing every news mention would drown the analyst. Adverse-media screening uses a structured query — the legal name, common aliases, and the beneficial owners — against curated news, regulatory enforcement, and court-record sources. Hits are classified by severity (enforcement action, fraud, litigation, neutral coverage), and only meaningful hits are surfaced in the report. The full result set is preserved in the audit trail in case the analyst wants to drill down.
What happens if the borrower's filing has expired or shows as delinquent?
Filing status is one of the most reliable diligence signals in commercial lending. A delinquent, dissolved, or administratively terminated SOS filing on an active borrower is a hard flag — the report classifies it as a flag rather than a match, blocks the deal from progressing without analyst acknowledgment, and the credit memo's borrower description picks up the filing status. Reinstatements that happened recently are detected and noted.
Can we add our own diligence sources to the report?
Yes. State-specific licensure registries (medical, contracting, alcohol, cannabis), industry-specific credentialing bodies, and your institution's internal watchlists can be added as configured sources. The diligence layer is designed to be extended — the four standard categories cover what most institutions need, but lenders with industry concentrations often add a category for their book's particular signals.
Related capabilities
Built to work together, not in isolation
See it run on a real borrower file.
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