The Competitive Advantages of the Cobalt Intelligence API (And Why "Good Enough" Data is Costing You Deals)

Most data providers build for "general business intelligence." They sell to sales teams looking for leads, marketing teams cleaning email lists, and procurement teams vetting vendors.

Lenders are an afterthought.

If you are a VP of Risk or a CTO at an alternative lender, "general business data" is useless. You don't need a marketing description of the business; you need the exact legal filing date to verify time-in-business (TIB). You don't need a "likely" address; you need the registered agent address for a UCC filing.

Cobalt Intelligence was built specifically for this underwriting workflow. Here is how our SOS API compares to the alternatives—manual verification, in-house scraping, and credit bureau data—and why the difference shows up in your default rates.

1. Real-Time Data vs. The "Cached" Trap

The biggest hidden cost in automated underwriting is stale data.

Many major data aggregators (even the "modern" ones) rely on cached databases. They scrape state registries once a month—or worse, once a quarter—and serve you that data as "current."

• The Scenario: A borrower dissolves their LLC on Monday to avoid a creditor. They apply for a loan with you on Tuesday.
• The Aggregator Result: Returns "Active" because their last scrape was two weeks ago. You fund the deal.
• The Cobalt Result: We query the Secretary of State database live at the moment of the request. We return "Dissolved" (with a screenshot timestamped today). You decline the deal.

We do not rely on "92% updated within 10 days". In lending, a 10-day gap is a fraud vulnerability. Our API provides primary-source verification, ensuring you are underwriting the entity as it exists right now.

2. All 50 States + DC: Normalized Schema

Shane, the CTO at 1West, considered building this in-house. He quickly realized that "integrating with all 50 states is obviously really complicated... without even saying anything about the maintenance".

Every state is different.

• California returns "Active."
• Texas returns "In Existence."
• New York might return "Good Standing."

If you build this yourself, your engineers have to write 51 different parsers and maintain them every time a state updates its HTML structure.

Cobalt handles this normalization for you. We map every varying state status into a single normalizedStatus field (e.g., Active, Inactive). Your decision engine only needs to check one field, regardless of whether the business is in Florida or Alaska.

3. Built Specifically for Lenders

Generic business APIs often miss the fields that actually matter for a credit decision. We prioritize the data points that drive underwriting waterfalls:

• Filing Date for TIB: We return the exact formation date. 1West uses this to automatically calculate if a borrower hits the 1-year or 3-year milestone, allowing them to offer better rates without manual review.
• Confidence Scoring: We provide a 0-1.0 confidence score so you can automate approvals. If confidenceLevel > 0.95, auto-approve. If < 0.80, flag for review. This granularity prevents false positives.
• Audit-Ready Screenshots: We return a link to a timestamped screenshot of the state registry. This gives you an unalterable audit trail for compliance and bank partners—something a JSON response alone cannot provide.

Comparison: The True Cost of Verification

You have three options: keep doing it manually, build a scraper, or use the Cobalt API. Here is the breakdown.

‍

TCO Analysis: Why "Building It" Loses Money

It is tempting to think, "It's just a website search, we can scrape it."

1West's CTO estimated the core integration with Cobalt took "less than a week". Compare that to the cost of an engineer (avg $150k/year) spending 3 months building and stabilizing scrapers for 50 states.

• Build Cost: ~$37,500 (3 months of eng time) + ongoing maintenance (10-20% of time).
• Cobalt Cost: A fraction of that, with implementation finished in days.

As 1West found, buying the solution "freed up a ton of bandwidth" for their processing team and let their engineers focus on their core platform, ABLE, rather than fixing broken scrapers.

Implementation Speed

This is not an enterprise software deployment that takes six months.

• Idea Financial called it "one of the faster integrations" they have ever done.
• 1West completed the core build in "less than a week".

The API is modern, RESTful, and documented for developers, not salespeople.

Next Steps

Stop relying on stale bureau data or expensive manual labor for your primary entity checks.

• Audit Your Current Lag: Compare your last 100 manual lookups. How many hours did that cost you?
• Test the Latency: Run a query in our sandbox. See the speed difference between a 2-second API call and a 15-minute manual review.
• Get the Docs: [API Documentation]

‍