An SOS API for business verification with max coverage

An SOS business registry search is one of the most authoritative and quickest ways to determine that a business is illegitimate during onboarding, because a business that isn’t registered with their state’s SOS office is likely to create a problem for you.
Most businesses can’t legally operate in the U.S. without a business TIN, so checking that theirs is valid is a quick step to complete at the beginning of any business identity verification process.

No intermediaries here — Middesk’s data comes directly from the Secretary of State offices for each individual state, and compiles them in one database that the API searches through.

Middesk’s full suite of business verification tools also use other data sources. We have additional authoritative data sources like the IRS, and alternative data sources like online web presence, social media, and IP address behavior.

Middesk’s SOS API looks up the actual registration status in the state’s SOS registry so it can verify the information you need. Our system is constantly refreshed with data that comes directly from the SOS business registries for every state, so you don’t have to go through each state’s registry manually to find the information.

Some people have different verification requirements to validate the legitimacy of a business, but Middesk’s API can help you validate businesses by verifying that: the business is active, the business is in Good Standing, the business is not Dissolved or Pending Inactive, its officially-registered name, its Entity Type, Addresses associated with the registration, its registration Date, and the Officers or Registered Agents of the business.
If there is no exact match found, the TIN matching API performs additional lookups to determine if the TIN is registered to a business with a different — but similar — name.

This is a great question because an API isn’t necessary for everyone. If you only onboard a couple of businesses every month and have team members that have time to manually search each SOS registry to verify the information, you likely don’t need the speed and bulk-functionality of an SOS API to get the job done.

However, each state’s SOS registry is different, has a different process to look up the information, and it would likely take a couple of hours per business to look up the information. If you’re onboarding dozens or hundreds of customers every month, you would need a huge team of people dedicated to this manual review process — and this is only a very small first step to onboarding your customers. An SOS API cuts all this manual work out and can do the same thing, in bulk, in seconds, using just one tool.

The API also cuts down on human error, because it can only return the results as they are. It doesn’t try to interpret what the SOS registry says or try to fill things in when they are missing, so its results are more accurate than a manual assessment of what you can find in each SOS database from a manual search.
A TIN API eliminates the manual work and internal resources spent on these lookups — all time that is better spent on Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD) and actual onboarding risk assessment.

To get started, you would need to contact our sales team and get your Middesk account set up (we recommend setting up a demo first to see exactly how it will work for you!). This can all be done within a couple of hours.

Once you’re set up, you can get your API key and set up your API environment using our documentation and our implementation team to help you. Most of our customers can easily integrate the API into their compliance system quickly, and can be running SOS registry API searches within a couple of days.