Carousel takes Forward Funding's merchant intake from four hours to one 15-minute session.
Identity and banking data stopped being collected by hand and checked afterwards. Applications finish in a single sitting, and 95% of fraudulent files are caught before they enter the system at all.
What eleven months of verified intake did for conversion and for fraud.
- Merchants stopped assembling a file across days — intake went from four hours to one session under 15 minutes.
- Fraud stopped arriving as clean-looking paperwork — 95% of fraudulent cases are now caught at the outset.
- Identity and banking are confirmed at the source, so nothing downstream is built on a document nobody could check.
Meet Forward Funding.
Forward Funding is a broker and funder of small business financing, publishing more than 18,000 businesses served and over 10,000 funded.
Both sides of that business feel intake the same way. As a broker, every hour a merchant spends assembling documents is an hour the deal can go elsewhere. As a funder, every file assembled by hand is a file whose identity and banking data has to be trusted before it can be underwritten — and trust is exactly what was getting harder as fraud attempts rose.
- Industry
- Small business funding
- Model
- Broker and direct funder
- Businesses served
- 18,000+
- Using Carousel for
- IDV, bank statement OCR, banking analysis & account connection
- Time to results
- 11 months
Identity and money both arrived as paperwork, and both had to be taken on faith.
Merchant data was reconciled by hand, across four hours and several sittings.
Identity documents and actual bank statements were collected manually and then reconciled into something underwriting could read. Four hours of merchant time is not one bad experience — it is a window in which a business owner reconsiders, gets busy, or accepts a faster offer.
Fraud was rising, and manual collection is where it gets through.
A photographed ID and a submitted statement are exactly the surfaces a synthetic identity is built to pass. When the check happens after collection rather than during it, the fraudulent file has already entered the system and consumed real underwriting time before anyone questions it.
Verify identity and banking at the source, in the same session.
One session replaces the document round-trip.
The merchant moves through a single guided flow. Bank statements are OCR'd and Carousel performs the banking analysis, or the account connects directly — either way the financial picture is built during intake rather than reconstructed after it.
Identity verification runs against the source, not the photograph.
Carousel's IDV checks the document itself and reads the signals around the session, including the originating IP. Synthetic identities that pass a visual inspection do not pass a source check, and they stop at the door rather than inside the queue.
One integration, both sides of the business.
Brokered files and directly funded files run the same intake, so the same verified record serves whichever way the deal goes.
A merchant finishes in one sitting, and the fraud never gets in.
Merchant intake, one session
What took four hours across multiple touchpoints now completes in a single session of under fifteen minutes, against Forward Funding's own prior process over an eleven-month engagement. Conversion and retention both sit downstream of that number.
Fraudulent cases caught at intake
Ninety-five percent of fraudulent cases are now identified at the outset rather than discovered later. Catching a synthetic identity before the file exists is worth more than catching it afterwards: nothing built on it ever has to be unwound.
Before Carousel, a lot of garbage was coming in — and with garbage coming in, garbage comes out. We couldn't catch fraud, and we couldn't rely on the data feeding our own systems. With Carousel, that changed completely.
OperationsForward Funding
In good company
The teams on Carousel — what they shipped, and what it gave back.
The infrastructure of yes.
See your intake run on Carousel — every rail, one demo.