Every platform’s customer base follows a familiar shape. At the top sit established, registered companies with tidy filings, the very accounts that most verification systems were built to handle. Below them stretches a long tail of sole traders, family businesses, first-time market vendors and gig sellers whose only paper trail may be a bank account.

According to AiPrise, the big names may sit at the head, but the real volume lies in the tail. For marketplaces, payment providers and SMB lenders, this segment accounts for most applicants, most onboarding costs and most of the leakage. Genuine sellers are lost to cumbersome processes, while fabricated ones slip through unnoticed.

Standard verification struggles here for several reasons. Corporate checks depend on a registry record, yet further down the tail that record shrinks to a business-name filing, then a tax ID, and sometimes nothing at all.

In many emerging markets, perfectly legitimate businesses have no formal footprint. Documentation also becomes informal, with utility bills, handwritten invoices and storefront photos replacing articles of incorporation. This evidence is valid but has traditionally demanded human judgement and a review queue.

The owners themselves are often thin-file, being young, recently arrived or newly banked, which means credit-based identity checks fail them just as platforms are trying to win their business. Add global variation, where a UK sole trader and an Indonesian reseller present entirely different challenges, and the problem multiplies.

Fraudsters understand this. They avoid the heavily scrutinised head of the portfolio and target the tail, where accounts are too small to justify manual review.

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