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Overview

Welcome to the Sardine Business Verification (KYB) integration guide and developer documentation. If you’re interested in learning more about our Business Verification (KYB) offering, how it works, and how to integrate, you’ve come to the right place. If you are a new or existing merchant interested in getting started or have questions, please reach out to your Sardine Account Manager.

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What is Business Verification (KYB)?

Sardine’s Business Verification (KYB) allows merchants to verify and screen business entities for fraud and compliance risk.

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Why is Business Verification important?

Sardine customers have requested Business Verification support for the following purposes:
  • Compliance: KYB practices help businesses comply with legal and regulatory requirements related to anti-money laundering (AML), counter-terrorist financing (CTF), and other financial crimes.
  • Risk management: helps businesses identify, assess, and manage risks associated with their customers.
  • Fraud prevention: helps businesses prevent fraud by verifying the identity and legitimacy of their customers.

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What signals does Sardine leverage for Business Verification?

Sardine offers a comprehensive verification product that leverages government data, web presence, address information, and government sanctions lists to provide a complete perspective on an application. Our business verification data includes:
  • Secretary of State Searches
  • EIN/TIN verifications
  • Sanction Watchlists
  • Address Analysis

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How can merchants leverage the business verification capability?

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Business Verification via our Dashboard

Business verification can be performed via our dashboard through the business intelligence section. To create a new verification, click New Verification and fill out the necessary fields for the specific report types. In the future, we will support multiple report types to be created, including UBOs. We will also support the ability to run different report types on existing business entities (pre-fill).

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Business Verification via our APIs

Business verification can be done through the Middesk or Sardine dashboard as well as via the async /businesses API. Business verification updates require listening to async webhook events.

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Configuring Rules to streamline Business Verification

Rules can be created around business entities through the rule engine.

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Why did Sardine decide to partner with Middesk for US Business Verification?

Middesk is the leading provider for US business verification services, given their unique partnership with the Secretary of State (SOS) in all US states, allowing them to reliably perform EIN/TIN (business TaxID number) verification. Middesk offers business entity verification services, including basic sanctions screening.

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Middesk offers basic sanction screening of US entities for the following lists:

Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)
  • Specially Designated Nationals
  • Foreign Sanctions Evaders
  • Palestinian Legislative Council
  • Sectoral Sanctions Identifications
  • Capta List
  • Non-SDN Menu-Based Sanctions
  • Non-SDN Iranian Sanctions
  • Non-SDN Chinese Military-Industrial Complex Companies List
Bureau of Industry and Security
  • Denied Persons List
  • Entity List
  • Unverified List
  • Military End User
Directorate of Defence Trade Controls
  • AECA/ITAR Debarred
Bureau of International Security and Non-Proliferation
  • Nonproliferation Sanctions

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Key benefits of Sardine & Middesk integration

Businesses turn to Middesk to help them verify businesses for Know-Your-Business (KYB) requirements. Middesk offers a dashboard and API for businesses to manage the business verification and screening requests lifecycle.
  • Bidirectional Dashboard & API Sync - Middesk makes business verification easy for small and large businesses through simple web dashboards and developer-oriented API experience. Through our partnership, Sardine and Middesk have worked together on a seamless integration and user experience.
  • SOS/TIN Verification - Leading vendor with access to the secretary of state databases for reliable business verification.
  • Sanctions Screening - Integrated sanctions screening and rule (“policy”) engine for OFAC and other relevant lists.

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What type of business verification and screening reports does Sardine support?

  • TIN Verification live: Leverage a more lightweight verification report focused only on TIN verification. This type of screening is ideal for customers looking to perform KYB in bulk or not needing the full Identity Report which includes Secretary of State verification.
  • UBO Screening live: Leverage a unique capability of Sardine, combining business verification (KYB) with customer verification (KYC/AML). Initially, Sardine will support accepting relevant information to verify a business as well as the information necessary to assess the compliance risk of related entities (eg. Sanctions). This capability is unique to Sardine and combined with our rules engine and network, allows for very unique alerting, investigation and reporting workflows.
  • Lien-search future: Lien Search is for lenders who need fast, accurate, quality liens data for smart decision-making on customers. Lien Search provides direct connections to government portals. The lien search product returns details from the UCC1 data for liens on an associate registered entity, including: the debtor, secured party, filing date, lapse date, file number, and status.
  • Corporate Documents future: Leverage state-level repositories to source and provide formation documents for businesses. We can return Articles of Incorporation (for corporations), Articles of Organization (for LLCs), and Certificates of Good Standing $5.00 per business where documents are ordered (additional to Identity Report)