Prove & Baselayer team up on business verification

Prove and Baselayer have formed a strategic partnership to add real-time business verification to ProveX. The agreement brings Baselayer's Know Your Business data into Prove's digital trust exchange.

The partnership is aimed at organisations that need to verify both an individual applicant and the business linked to that applicant during onboarding. Under the arrangement, Prove Pre-Fill for Business connects an applicant to the business they represent, while Baselayer provides business verification, entity resolution, ownership intelligence and fraud signals through ProveX.

The move addresses a long-standing problem in business onboarding: identity checks on individuals and checks on companies often sit in separate workflows. That separation can mean multiple suppliers, multiple application programming interface calls and extra verification steps, slowing approvals and increasing reliance on manual review.

For banks, fintech groups, marketplaces and other digital businesses, the issue has become more pressing as more applications shift online. Prove cited estimates that businesses globally lose an average of 7.7% of annual revenue to fraud, equivalent to USD $534 billion, while US business formation has risen 53% over the past decade.

In practical terms, the combined service is designed to answer two questions within one onboarding flow: whether a person is associated with a business, and whether that business should be approved. Instead of asking applicants to complete a separate Know Your Business process after identity verification, the system aims to return structured signals during the same application journey.

Fragmented records

Know Your Business checks have proved difficult to automate because company data is spread across state registries, government records and third-party data providers. Records may be incomplete or outdated, and ownership structures can be hard to trace, particularly in the US, where there is no single central database for beneficial ownership.

That fragmentation has left many compliance and risk teams dependent on manual checks. Those reviews add cost and can delay legitimate customers at the point where lenders and digital platforms are trying to reduce friction in account opening, credit applications and transaction enablement.

Baselayer's role in the partnership is to resolve different inputs into what the companies describe as a single authoritative business record. ProveX then uses that record to verify a business's legitimacy, ownership and operational status in real time, returning signals that can inform approval or risk decisions.

The integration also reduces the amount of information an applicant may need to enter manually. Prove said its pre-fill product uses an applicant's phone number and other collected attributes to connect that person with the business they represent and populate known business information before the Know Your Business checks are completed.

Single workflow

The main attraction for customers is a simpler technology stack. Instead of linking separate systems for identity verification, business verification and data enrichment, organisations can access both Know Your Customer and Know Your Business checks through one workflow inside ProveX.

That could be particularly relevant for engineering and compliance teams managing several external data sources and approval systems. Fewer integrations may mean less code to maintain, fewer exceptions to handle between vendors and a more consistent set of decision signals at the point of application.

The market for business verification tools has expanded as fraud controls and compliance obligations have tightened. Financial institutions need to understand not only whether a company exists, but also who owns or controls it, whether it is operational and whether it presents sanctions or other risk concerns.

Derek Lanni, Vice President, Acquisition Fraud Strategy, at Synchrony, described the onboarding challenge facing organisations.

"Organisations must balance new fraud threats, compliance requirements and customer expectations, all of which makes business onboarding more complex. The ability to quickly establish trust while maintaining confidence in the legitimacy of businesses and the individuals behind them has become critical for financial institutions and all digital businesses," Lanni said.

Both Prove and Baselayer were named among the top 20 leaders in business and entity verification in Liminal's 2025 Business and Entity Verification Report, according to the companies. The partnership adds to a broader push across the identity and compliance sector to combine consumer identity checks with company verification in a single process rather than treating them as separate tasks.

The underlying problem remains structural: organisations still have to navigate 50 state registries, inconsistent company records and opaque ownership structures when verifying US businesses.