Rho was founded in 2018 to simplify business banking for modern companies. Today they serve businesses nationwide with a unified platform for corporate cards, banking, payments, and expense management. As the customer base grew, so did the complexity of onboarding — and manual verification couldn't keep up.

"When I joined, we were handling about 300 to 400 applications a month across five analysts," said Derek Scharfenberg, Head of Onboarding. "Today, we're processing over 2,000 with just two additional analysts. Without automation, we wouldn't have hit our board targets or landed key partnerships."

To unlock that scale, Rho integrated Middesk through Alloy, enabling real-time business verification directly in the application flow.

As Rho's customer base expanded, manual KYB reviews became unsustainable. The onboarding team was spending too much time cross-referencing Secretary of State data and resolving address mismatches. These inefficiencies slowed decision times and created friction for customers.

"In fintech, things move fast and can feel chaotic," said Jeff Pasquerella, Chief Compliance Officer. "We've learned to embrace that chaos as an opportunity for growth, and compliance has to move just as quickly to support it."

The team also recognized limitations in their verification approach. "Historically, we relied on a pretty binary green-light / no-green-light approach," Jeff explained. "Middesk helped us evolve beyond that and develop a much deeper understanding of business identity, address validation, and overall risk."

Rho needed a trusted verification partner that could help them automate identity checks, streamline compliance, and keep pace with growth while preventing fraud.

Rho adopted Middesk's verification solution to rebuild its onboarding process from the ground up. Middesk provides real-time access to authoritative business data, automating the checks analysts once performed manually and helping onboarding teams verify legitimacy, activity status, and ownership details instantly.

With Middesk integrated into Alloy, Rho now verifies business entities instantly through live state registry connections, eliminates manual proof-of-activation checks for Delaware and New Jersey businesses, and has improved address validation accuracy from 70% to nearly 100%.

"Onboarding is our first line of defense," said Jeff. "If you get it right, you prevent bad actors from ever getting in while still making it easy for good customers to get started."

By automating KYB with Middesk Verify, Rho scaled its onboarding capacity 5× without proportional headcount growth.

Before Middesk, Rho's analysts spent hours each day manually searching Secretary of State sites, confirming business activations, and verifying addresses. Middesk automated those checks, returning authoritative results instantly through Alloy, turning hours of manual review into instant verification.

"If we were still using the old system, we wouldn't have met our board targets," said Derek Scharfenberg. "We would've missed key partnerships and left revenue on the table. Middesk gave us back the time and confidence we needed to scale."

Beyond efficiency, automation became a competitive advantage. "We don't see compliance as a back-office function anymore," said Jeff. "It's a growth lever, and when done well, it becomes a real selling point."

That shift has translated into tangible business wins. "One of the main reasons we've won deals is that we give customers a sense of security," Jeff explained. "They feel safe working with us, and compliance plays a huge role in that trust."

What was once a manual process became a strategic growth driver. It freed analysts to focus on edge cases and customer experience while enabling faster activations across every application.

"Partnering with the Middesk team has been incredible," said Jeff. "We're able to understand our client base at a very in-depth level and build better decision models and risk models."

The partnership extends beyond traditional KYB. "We want to make better decisions faster," Jeff explained. "We want to be something that enables sales, helping us go after customers and clients that benefit the most from a revenue and compliance perspective."

When Rho reassessed its vendor stack, Middesk stood out. "We're willing to spend the money to have the right vendors," said Jeff. "We need best-in-class vendors that can work with other vendors and be team players. That value needs to multiply on the revenue side."

Rho continues to expand its automation efforts and is turning its attention to the next frontier: fraud prevention and deeper business intelligence.

"Our goal is to grow, but to do it in a risk-based way," said Jeff. "That balance is critical."

The team is building toward more sophisticated automation. "We're actively building toward automated decisioning and risk models, where the right customers can be auto-approved and manual work is reserved for higher-risk cases," Jeff explained.

Looking ahead, Rho is partnering closely with Middesk to develop new risk signals and expand real-time verification beyond KYB. Together, both teams are exploring ways to bring industry-level risk indicators and behavioral data directly into the application process, enabling Rho to spot anomalies earlier and maintain a frictionless customer experience.

"We realize there's so much more functionality," said Derek Scharfenberg. "After talking with the Middesk team, we're already thinking about how to bring more risk data into our process and make verification completely real-time."

Rho didn't just improve onboarding. They rebuilt their foundation, and now compliance is how they win deals.