Sonovate is on a mission to reshape the future of work through its embedded payments and invoice factoring solutions. Focusing on recruitment agencies, consultancies and online work platforms who place freelancers and contractors, it has become a market leader by outmanoeuvring traditional financial institutions and providing a better customer experience. 

Companies typically utilise invoice factoring, where they borrow money against the amounts due from customers, to help manage their cashflow and scale up their business faster.

Having previously relied on manual processes to verify the foundational information about their customers, Sonovate’s product team realised the need for a solution they could integrate into their product to provide company data from around the world at scale.

Company data was needed to support critical business processes:

• Customer onboarding
  Before onboarding a customer, Sonovate needs to carry out Know Your Customer (KYC) checks – which often start with verifying a company’s key details from the relevant company register. For companies registered outside the UK, Sonovate’s risk team previously had to manually consult the appropriate register each time – which slowed the process down.
• Credit decisioning
  To enable fast invoice finance credit decisions for its customers, Sonovate also needs to verify key details about the companies their customers had received invoices from – which they wanted financing for. This was made difficult by the manual nature of the process, and because when their customers upload data from their accounting system into Sonovate, the company names used rarely matched their respective legal company names.

Sonovate integrated the OpenCorporates API directly into their platform to help solve these challenges more efficiently by automating the collection of global company data.

Data received via the API is the first point of call when Sonovate’s risk team conducts the identification and verification (ID&V) stage of KYC for new customers.

Additionally, when customers add a new company to Sonovate that they want to receive invoice financing for, the platform calls on our API to identify the foundational details about them. If the company is successfully verified, then a discretionary credit limit is awarded. Further checks against other data sources are made if the customer then wants to extend that limit.

Sonovate selected OpenCorporates’ transparent company data for 3 main reasons:

• Global coverage
  Having first assessed whether it was possible to integrate directly into company registers themselves, Sonovate’s product team identified OpenCorporates as the most efficient option to integrate global company data into their platform.
• Data that’s easy to work with
  As OpenCorporates arranges the inconsistent data it collects from over 140 jurisdictions into a harmonised schema with open identifiers, it makes the data easy to integrate into Sonovate’s processes and speeds up their ability to improve their customer experience.
• Access at scale via an API
  By ingesting data via the OpenCorporates API, Sonovate’s team or its customers can simply type a company’s name into their platform and relevant data is immediately retrieved.

• Quicker credit decisions & improved customer experience
  As Sonovate is able to more quickly verify the existence and foundational details about companies, their customers can receive real-time decisions on their applications for invoice financing – improving their customer experience.
• Creates efficiencies for risk team during onboarding
  Sonovate’s risk team saves many hours when onboarding new customers by calling on company data via the API – instead of needing to manually look up each company in its respective company registry each time. Automating the collection of official company data to inform this ID&V stage of onboarding frees the team up to analyse and manage risk, rather than spending lots of time aggregating information.
• Improved data quality
  As the official company data Sonovate now uses to power these critical processes is delivered via an API, it has improved the overall quality of the data in their systems – as standardised data is delivered automatically, rather than through manual processes.