How Whitepages Turned Their Data into an Identity Verification Tool for Online Lenders

Whitepages might be a 20-year old company but the data they’ve amassed over time can add significant value to online lenders, the company claims. Whitepages Pro, which offers identify verification, allows lenders to gauge if an individual is real. “It examines fraud risk, not credit risk,” company CEO Rob Eleveld said in a brief interview at LendIt last week.

A simple query of an individual’s name, phone number, email, address or business name will return results not easily accessible elsewhere, like how long that person’s email address has been in their system or the likelihood that the email address was generated by a bot, not a real person. A match is good, no match might not be good, they say. Their system can also do things like identify the carrier the phone number belongs to and whether or not that carrier, if it’s VOIP or something, might have a higher propensity for fraud.

Eleveld said that an impostor could try applying for a loan with a stolen social security number, but it’s harder for them to fake an entire online profile. These queries, he confirmed, can all be done through an API since online lenders are typically driven by speed. Big names are already using it such as Quicken Loans and loandepot, and those are just a couple of names from the online lending space alone.

“The company houses more than 5 billion global identity records,” according to their website, and customers such as “Wells Fargo, Microsoft, Western Union, Under Armour, Priceline, and American Airlines use Whitepages Pro data to mitigate risk and improve the customer experience.”