AI Needs Clean Fuel. Markaaz Says It Has Plenty of It for FinTechs

As industries increasingly lean on digital transformation, the challenge of managing vast, inconsistent and often contradictory datasets is growing more complex.

The upside? When that challenge is successfully met, the ability to seamlessly access and synthesize reliable third-party business data can increasingly make or break a company’s potential competitive edge.

“By unifying thousands of data feeds, we’re transforming [business verification and Know Your Business (KYB)] compliance from a cost center into a growth driver,” David Proctor, president of product and services at Markaaz, told PYMNTS.

After all, accurate know-your-customer (KYC) information has become table stakes, not only for banks fulfilling anti-money laundering (AML) mandates but for the small businesses that depend on fast credit decisions, friction-free onboarding and uninterrupted cash flow. When a merchant’s legal name is misspelled or an address drifts across multiple databases, payments can stall, compliance alerts can trip and revenue can disappear.

Small businesses can be particularly vulnerable to these data pitfalls. Unlike large enterprises with dedicated compliance teams and financial buffers, many small firms live or die by their next payment cycle. A delayed loan approval or a frozen account due to a KYC mismatch can mean the difference between seizing a growth opportunity or missing payroll.

Proctor said his firm’s Markaaz Ready APIs (application programming interfaces) and the Markaaz 360 service can help eliminate those blind spots. It isn’t just another data aggregator, he said. It’s a paradigm shift.

“The first step is ingesting and standardizing that data. Then that second step is doing that entity matching and the match-merge of all the different data sources into a single record on a business, which we call the golden record,” Proctor said.

The directory already covers some 500 million companies in 200 countries, each tagged with nearly “250 columns of data or attributes,” an output that Markaaz’s search algorithms access in real-time at tremendous scale, Proctor said.

“There’s a ranking to the data source that’s tied to reliability and accuracy proved over time,” Proctor said. Sources like government registries or a company’s accounts receivable data get priority in resolving data conflicts, which allows Marquez to maintain both consistency and integrity.

With Markaaz 360, clients are able to bolt their own third-party sources or niche databases onto that spine, feeding back new attributes that re-enrich the file for every downstream process from prospecting to payments.

And in today’s landscape, whether it’s feeding recommendation engines, powering predictive analytics or enhancing digital customer journeys, effectively processed data can become a strategic asset that fuels innovation across the enterprise.

Across industries, organizations face the same issue: business data is fragmented across jurisdictions, formats and regulatory regimes. Legacy systems are siloed and often out of sync with the real-time demands of today’s markets. Global privacy laws — from GDPR in Europe to CCPA in California — only add complexity, making it difficult to centralize data without running afoul of local regulations.

“We have a standard global dataset on all the businesses in the world,” Proctor said. When a bank wants Markaaz to blend in its own specialty files and other third-party data, the company creates “a bespoke golden record for that client and their specific use case,” available only to that customer. Crucially, the tailoring relies on configurable rules, “not custom code,” keeping support costs in check.

Traditional master data management (MDM) projects attempt to create a single customer record by stitching together internal data sources between customer relationship management (CRM) and billing systems. But these initiatives are often large transformation projects, notoriously slow and expensive — often taking 12 to 18 months to deploy and millions of dollars to maintain.

With Markaaz 360, Proctor noted, companies don’t need to rebuild their systems to stay compliant; they simply point their third-party data to Markaaz and adjust their rules.

And with the era of business artificial intelligence (AI) around the corner, the implications of high-quality business data go well beyond marketing and risk assessment. As financial institutions move to infuse AI into credit scoring, fraud detection and supplier management, data breadth and accuracy become a competitive advantage.

“It’s more data, it’s better data, it’s highly accurate data,” Proctor said. “And that’s going to fuel a lot of our clients’ AI initiatives.”

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