Heron Automates SMB Underwriting's Last Manual Step: The Background Check

Heron's new Background Check product finds and screens both the business owner and the business in under a minute — matching the right records across credit, courts, Secretary of State filings, and premium nationwide public-records databases, then applying each funder's own policy — so SMB funders can send offers that hold up, instead of clawing back deals their brokers already sold.

NEW YORK, Aug. 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Heron, the AI platform that automates underwriting workflows for 200+ SMB funders, brokers, and insurers, today announced the launch of Heron Background Checks, an automated owner-and-business screening product that runs inside a funder's existing underwriting workflow.

Background checks are commonly the last check before a deal is funded, and most funders still run them by hand: records stitched together across systems, an underwriter reading a 40-page report for 10–15 minutes a deal, while every deal behind it waits in the queue.

Roughly one in five deals that pass cashflow checks is still killed at the background stage and is often after the broker has already sold the offer to the merchant, forcing funders to claw back offers and damaging the broker relationships that drive their deal flow.

Heron Background Checks flips that sequence. The moment a deal clears a funder's cashflow policy, Heron automatically:

• Searches and matches the correct owner and business, confirming who is actually behind the application against court records, Secretary of State records, plus premium nationwide public-records databases with a 97% owner match rate and a full search trail;
• Converts raw records into clean, deduplicated signals — liens and judgments, sanctions hits, criminal history, bankruptcies, and unreported officers;
• Applies the funder's own policy to those signals for a pass / review / decline outcome in under a minute, with evidence linked to every finding.

Deals that pass need no human review; anything gray is routed to an underwriter with the evidence attached. For an early customer, Heron automatically caught over 90% of the declines the funder's underwriting team had made by hand, before an underwriter ever opened a file.

"You can't get a soft offer out in five minutes that holds up 95% of the time while a human is reading a 40-page report at the end of the funnel," said Johannes Jaeckle, CEO and co-founder of Heron. "Moving the background check ahead of the offer is the last piece of fully automated pre-offer underwriting and it means our customers never have to take back an offer a broker has already sold."

"If we got a straight-through application, we could get an offer out the door in five minutes. Before, it was hours," said the CEO of one early customer.

Heron Background Checks is live today for funders in the United States, joining Heron's wide product suite for the revenue-based financing industry including, automated deal intake, cashflow analytics, and credit decisioning.

To learn more or book a demo to see the background check run on your own deals, visit herondata.io/background-check.

About Heron

Heron Data automates document-heavy underwriting work for SMB lenders, brokers, and insurers processing more than 100,000 documents a day for over 200+ firms. Heron's AI handles intake, extraction, enrichment, checks, and decisioning, syncing clean, validated data directly to each customer's CRM or system of record. Heron Data is a trade name of Open Credit Technologies, Inc., headquartered in New York. Learn more at herondata.io.

Swati Gupta - [email protected]

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SOURCE Heron Data