Sacramento public records search service Enformion has merged Florida-based Tracers into its operation, expanding its identity verification, fraud mitigation and search data services for businesses.
Enformion offers services including identity verification, fraud and risk mitigation, as well as database searches for finance, collections and investigations work, using its access to 120 billion public records.
Enformion offers businesses a cloud-based service that “fits on top of the data” to make the information useful for customers, company CEO Amber Higgins told the Business Journal.
In its merger with Tracers, Enformion has increased its access to investigative software by bringing it in house. Enformion has worked with Tracers for years, Higgins said.
She declined to disclose the value of the transaction or either company's annual revenue.
About 40% of Enformion’s 85 employees work in its Sacramento offices, and the rest work remotely in about a dozen states. Tracers, based in Brooksville, Florida, has 20 employees.
Customers for the combined company include financial services companies, government agencies, law firms, e-commerce companies and collections companies.
The service, which uses artificial intelligence and machine learning, allows clients to match public records data to confirm their customers’ identities. Records used include addresses, mobile phone data and other information.
The data provided to businesses allows them to verify, confirm or stop transactions.
Especially in online financial transactions and in e-commerce, the validation is important, Higgins said, because the industry last year is believed to have experienced $20 billion in losses due to synthetic fraud. Synthetic fraud is when a nefarious user has a few pieces of personally identifiable information and seeks to either spoof that person or to create a new identity for financial gain.
Earlier this year, Enformion was spun out of Sacramento-based PeopleFinders, which concentrates on finding people, background screenings and verifications in more of a business-to-consumer mode. Enformion’s target customers are enterprise-level businesses, Higgins said.
Both companies offer a self-service platform with access to 120 billion public and proprietary records from more than 6,000 data sources. It has more than 240 million consumer profiles.
