SentiLink Makes History As First eCBSV Provider

All of us at SentiLink are extremely excited to announce that this Friday evening at 6:48pm PT, SentiLink became the first organization to go live with eCBSV!

The first application in history was from a consumer who applied for a mortgage with one of our 20 eCBSV partners. The consumer consented to sharing their information with SentiLink, our partner, and the Social Security Administration, SentiLink submitted a request to the SSA, and the SSA determined that the information matched. This expedited the approval process for the consumer and the lender and saved them from having to fill out and sign a paper form.

eCBSV (“Electronic Consent Based SSN Verification”) is a new service being offered by the SSA that allows permitted entities to electronically obtain consent from consumers and in real-time verify name/DOB/SSN combinations directly with the SSA. Until this evening, requests for SSA validation required a completed SSA89 form and a wet signature and took hours or even days to process, significantly limiting their use. eCBSV digitizes and dramatically expedites this process.

While the stream of eCBSV requests we’re now processing are only the beginning, we believe that within several years there will be tens or hundreds of millions of requests, and eCBSV will be accepted as a major component in KYC and identity verification processes.

The entire team at SentiLink has worked very hard to make eCBSV available for our partners and their customers. This includes getting up before 3:00AM last July in order to submit one of the first pilot applications to the SSA, implementing all of the OIDC corner cases in the integration, doing original research on match rates against the SSA’s source-of-truth Numindent file, designing implementations and potential use-cases with our financial institution partners, and working closely with the SSA to iron out the consent requirements.

I’d like to thank the entire team at SentiLink for sweating and hustling to push this over the line. I’d also like to thank our initial 20 partners; no first time implementation is perfect, and we’re lucky to work with 20 innovative, forward-thinking organizations whose feedback has been and continues to be critical to the success of this program. And lastly all of us would like to thank the SSA, whose hard work and late nights standing up eCBSV has made everything possible.

We don’t believe eCBSV will be perfect or a stand-alone solution, but it is certainly a big step forward and a very useful new tool for financial services companies. We are humbled to help open a new chapter in identity verification in the United States.

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Naftali Harris is Co-founder and CEO of SentiLink. Prior to SentiLink, Naftali built and led the Risk Decisioning team at the online lender, Affirm. Naftali graduated from the University of Chicago with a BA in statistics, and subsequently earned an MA in statistics from Stanford, where he was a Stanford Graduate Fellow. Naftali was named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in 2020.