Two quarters after the initial launch of our KYB product, we’re continuing to search for ways to make onboarding businesses more efficient and less risky for our customers. Over the quarter, we adjusted our Identify package to include legal entity addresses, names, and people information to make identification of businesses easier for our customers. We also added a new package – KYB + TIN Verification.
Since launch, we’ve heard the need from our customers for validating Taxpayer Identification Numbers (TINs) to reduce the risk of onboarding fraudulent businesses. All valid traditional businesses entities will have an Employee Identification Number (EIN) issued by the IRS, and these are granted at formation. Sole proprietorships without EINs, meanwhile, can use their SSN or ITIN as their TIN. Because these TINs are granted at formation, they are a valuable tool for screening businesses early in the onboarding funnel.
Enigma now offers TIN screening to assist our customers with this component of KYB. We focus our efforts on entities with an EIN. When running a TIN verification we can either successfully approve a match or, if the match fails, communicate that a business has either given you a Business Name and TIN that don’t match IRS records or a TIN that does not exist.
Talking to our customers we hear two common themes come up when discussing how to run effective sales and marketing campaigns; they need to narrow in on the right prospects to sell to, and reach out to them at the right time.
When narrowing in on the right prospects to sell to, our customers also need to be able to prioritize the highest value prospects for them within their universe of potential leads. Enigma’s card revenue data, sourced from a panel of more than 40% of all US consumer credit and debit card transactions, is a powerful way to prioritize high value leads. However, a question we have often been asked by customers interested in US ecommerce retailers is what % of these card revenues are made up of online spend. While website traffic data points such as page visits can provide directional insight, they cannot capture other important drivers of increased online spend such as higher average transaction size.
This quarter we have productionized card not present revenues as an additional attribute to help our customers prioritize the highest value leads within their e-commerce ICP. Card not present revenues include card revenues from online transactions, phone orders, mail orders, purchases made with a card on file - such as a subscription or membership-related spend, and invoice payments. Card not present revenues are not equivalent to online spend - and in some businesses will be very far from it. For example, a golf club allowing members to place charges for meals, lessons and shop purchases to the card on file for their membership will have very high card not present revenues, but a good proportion of these may be offline payments. However, for customers selling to traditional B2C retailers within the subset Enigma has already identified as having online payment capabilities, card not present revenues can be used to help prioritize leads, as a proxy for online revenues from purchases made on the business’ website. This helps improve the efficiency of our customers' sales campaigns, and ensure they are focusing on the highest value e-commerce retail leads first, or directing these leads to the relevant sales territories.
In addition to our range of attributes for segmentation and prioritization, Enigma also provides triggers for sales and marketing campaigns. One of these is our new business trigger, which identifies and generates a lead list of businesses that have launched within the last year. This helps our customers who are selling a product that is either most relevant to newly formed businesses, or to businesses that are unlikely to change from an initial provider. This is often relevant for core payments software and organizational software products. Enigma serves these customers by identifying when a business was first launched (via registration filings), and if and when they have started selling to customers (via our consumer card panel).
Last quarter, we talked about applying a fine-tuned BERT model to the text on a business’ website to accurately predict the industries of businesses in our product. This quarter we applied a similar model to the businesses in our new business trigger marketing list, and we now have an industry for around half of the businesses in our new business trigger list. This helps our customers include or exclude certain types of businesses from their new business trigger campaigns, improving the efficiency of their marketing campaigns.
Current customers can reach out to their CS representatives with questions and feedback. If you’re new to Enigma and interested in our Sales and Marketing or Onboarding and KYB products, please get in touch.