They were paying a vendor
to do work they still did themselves.

Katie Beach's team at Wisetack kept hitting the same failure. They were paying vendors to screen merchant applications, but a portion of those applications never made it into Wisetack's review queue — so nobody could act on them.

When it happened, investigating and resolving it often took several days, frequently ending in manual verification anyway. Meanwhile merchants would contact support repeatedly for updates, pulling the team away from higher-value work. By the time anyone traced what had gone wrong, some merchants were already looking at other financing.

The economics compounded the problem. The prior vendor charged for every verification attempt regardless of whether it produced a usable result, so low match rates meant the team redid the work by hand while still paying for it.

Wisetack began evaluating alternatives in early 2024 with a straightforward test: could Enigma match or exceed the existing vendors' performance while reducing cost? It showed two things — match rates comparable to the incumbents, and richer business context in the response. Secretary of State filings, website verification and alternative addresses all helped the team decide faster on the cases that did need a human.

From July to November 2024, Wisetack, Enigma and Alloy — Wisetack's orchestration platform — built the integration together. The design preserved everything that already worked: underwriters needed no retraining, Alloy workflows stayed intact, and Enigma slotted in as the first verification layer with the existing vendors as fallbacks. Enigma moved to the top of the waterfall in December 2024.

January through March 2025 was active tuning, largely on fuzzy matching for business name variations. A contractor filing as “John's Home Repair LLC” but applying as “Johns Home Repair” shouldn't need a manual review.

The honest version of this result is that manual review rates settled back to 43% — essentially where they started. What changed was what a manual review is. Before Enigma, reviewers chased mismatches, reconciled contradictory data and double-checked work Wisetack had already paid a vendor to do. After, they make underwriting decisions on genuine edge cases, working from a richer data package.

By September 2025 the fintech KYB vendor was no longer required in the process and Katie's team removed it, going from three KYB vendors to two: Enigma as primary, one other as backup for edge cases. Applications now flow into Wisetack's queue without gaps or handoffs, and the team keeps full control of the workflow.

The cost result held throughout: more than 60% savings against the previous fintech KYB vendor, with Enigma handling most verifications as primary and cascade calls to more expensive backups happening rarely.