Business onboarding breaks at two points: when users enter data incorrectly and when your systems require data users cannot provide. Most verification platforms address these problems after submission, which means errors have already entered your workflow. Manual review teams catch mismatches days later, approvals stall, and users abandon incomplete applications. The cost compounds across thousands of onboarding attempts.
Regulatory changes due to the FinCEN exemption order from earlier this year now allow financial institutions to pull EINs from third parties without requiring customers to compare that to customer-submitted information, opening the door for prefill experiences that streamline onboarding while maintaining compliance.
The cost of getting onboarding wrong is substantial. When businesses are asked to provide documents due to verification failures, 50% drop out of the flow. Every name mismatch, incomplete field, or manual review request puts conversion at risk.
Middesk is now addressing these problems during initial data entry and seamlessly in the background of every verification request, enabling faster onboarding with higher data quality from the first interaction.
Today, we are releasing three Prefill capabilities that shift verification forward in the onboarding process: smart populate, autocomplete with fraud mitigation, and business enrichment order. Together, these capabilities improve both the speed and quality of onboarding decisions by eliminating the primary source of verification failures and delivering complete business profiles without adding user friction.
Smart populate: Flexible input for instant verification
Onboarding flows break when users don't have the exact information you're asking for. Some businesses know their EIN but not their legal address. Others have their website URL readily available but struggle with exact name matching. Traditional verification requires specific inputs in a specific order.
Smart populate accepts flexible inputs (business name and address, EIN, website URL, or DBA name), enabling customers to start prefill from whatever identifier their users have on hand. When a user provides their EIN or website instead of searching by name, smart populate performs reverse lookup to return the complete business profile.
POST /v1/prefill/businesses returns verified business details (legal name, address, last 4 digits of EIN, formation date, officers, website, and industry classification) in under 600 milliseconds. Coverage as of December 2025: 50% industry classification, 50% website URLs, 65% EIN (masked for security), 95% addresses when including all address types.
Input flexibility means onboarding flows adapt to user context. Businesses with their EIN readily available can skip name search entirely. Users who know their website or DBA can start there instead. The result: fewer abandoned applications and faster time to verification.
Autocomplete: Verification during data entry
95% of verification failures stem from name mismatches. Users enter trade names instead of legal names, make spelling errors, or struggle to identify the correct entity among similar businesses. Each error triggers manual review cycles that delay approvals and increase your operational costs.
Autocomplete eliminates this failure mode by surfacing authoritative Secretary of State records as users type. POST /v1/identities/autocomplete returns structured suggestions in under 300 milliseconds, delivering results with each keystroke. Users find the correct business in 2-3 keystrokes instead of manually entering and verifying every individual field.
The API delivers consistent accuracy across typing patterns. When users type a full business name, autocomplete returns an exact match as the first result 95% of the time. The match rate holds at 47% even when users are mid-typing (when approximately 60% of the name is entered), improving to 74% as they approach completion. Each suggestion includes the legal name, up to three associated addresses, up to three officers, and the entity type. This gives users the context needed to select the correct business immediately.
Response times remain below 300 milliseconds at the 95th percentile and under 650 milliseconds at the 99th percentile. Autocomplete can be called directly from your frontend using your Publishable API key, enabling fast typeahead experiences without backend proxying. However, for high-risk use cases, we recommend implementing additional fraud controls beyond the default IP-based rate limiting. Our Prefill SDK (launching H1 2026) will include advanced fraud detection (device fingerprinting, velocity checks, and anomaly detection) built into the client by default.
Business enrichment order: Complete profiles without user friction
Users cannot provide every data point your compliance and risk teams need. Downstream workflows - risk scoring, credit decisions, segmentation - require complete profiles with full EINs, website URLs, industry classifications, employee counts, revenue ranges, and formation details.
Business enrichment order collects what users know and retrieves everything else in the background. POST /v1/businesses with orders: [{"product": "business_enrichment"}] returns complete profiles in approximately 60 seconds while users proceed through onboarding without interruption.
The coverage difference is substantial. Business enrichment order returns industry classifications for 99% of businesses compared to 50% in smart populate (as of December 2025). Website URL coverage reaches 62% versus 50% in smart populate. Full EINs return at 65% with 100% confidence threshold. Formation dates appear in 94% of profiles, officer data in 74%, and address alignment to submitted data in 66%.
This improvement comes from the retrieval method. Smart populate prioritizes speed, returning cached data in under 600 milliseconds. Business enrichment order performs live web scraping and deep data retrieval over approximately one minute. The extended processing time enables dramatically higher coverage for workflows that require complete profiles, while the asynchronous execution ensures users never wait for enrichment to complete.
Infrastructure for verified identity
Prefill operates as part of Middesk's broader verification infrastructure. Smart populate, autocomplete, and business enrichment order integrate directly with Verify, providing the data foundation that powers KYB compliance decisions. As businesses move through onboarding, Prefill ensures the identity data entering your verification workflows is both accurate at submission and comprehensive for downstream decision making.
Unlike consumer-focused prefill vendors, Middesk delivers KYB-grade business data from authoritative sources (Secretary of State filings, IRS records). Our 65% EIN coverage is built on a proprietary cache based on Middesk's differentiated distribution with financial institutions and strong network density across our customer base. This first-party data advantage and network effects create assets competitors cannot replicate.
These releases build toward a future where verified identities transfer across the Middesk network. When a business completes verification once, that verified identity travels with them across customers. Businesses no longer re-enter the same information, re-verify their identity, or provide documents multiple times for each new relationship. Verification becomes critical infrastructure that scales across business relationships, accelerating time to revenue for both businesses and their customers.
Smart populate, autocomplete, and business enrichment order are now available. If you want to enable these capabilities, reach out to info@middesk.com. You can also explore the integration guides for smart populate, autocomplete, business enrichment order.
