Heron Data launched automated Background Checks, a screening product that matches business owners and companies across credit, court, and public records in under a minute. The AI platform serves over 200 SMB funders, brokers, and insurers. Background checks typically represent the final manual step before funding. Roughly one in five deals passing cashflow checks still fail at this stage, often after brokers have already presented offers to merchants. Heron's system searches across court records, Secretary of State filings, and nationwide databases with a 97% owner match rate. It converts raw records into clean signals covering liens, judgments, sanctions, criminal history, and bankruptcies, then applies each funder's own policy for pass, review, or decline decisions. For early customers, the system automatically caught over 90% of declines that underwriters previously identified manually. The product is now available for US funders, complementing Heron's existing suite for revenue-based financing.

How its work with Heron Data is transforming manual submissions. Over the past few months, NBS Underwriting Limited has been working with Heron Data to make it easier for brokers to submit manual presentations to NBS. Heron's technology converts emailed proposal forms, presentations and supporting documents into structured submissions within its quotation system. This reduces the time spent manually entering information and allows its underwriters to focus on reviewing risks and responding to brokers. As NBS Underwriting Limited continue to introduce this technology across more of its products, Heron Data has taken a closer look at the impact it is already having on submission volumes, underwriting efficiency and turnaround times. Read their full case study below. The following case study was originally produced by Heron Data and has been reproduced with their permission. NBS halves underwriting time and reviews 25-40% more submissions a day with Heron. NBS, a UK MGA that has grown to a ~£120M book across 40+ products since 2011, ran a portal-only model that required brokers - or its own underwriters - to manually enter every risk. By using Heron to automate submission intake across that broker portal, NBS cut underwriting time roughly in half, freed underwriters to review 25-40% more submissions a day, and lifted quote volume even in a soft market - all without adding headcount, and with a projected £8-10M in additional premium as every line moves onto Heron. For most of the book, roughly 95% of submissions came in the same way: a broker manually entered the risk into the portal. On the professional indemnity scheme, where NBS took proposal forms directly, underwriters did the keying themselves - and cross-referenced up to ten documents per submission to make sure the numbers tied out. The more complex the line, the worse it got. A commercial combined risk with two premises could run up to 120 questions. NBS is 100% portal-based, so Heron sits between the incoming submission and that portal. A broker or an underwriter forwards the submission by email, in whatever form it arrives - a proposal form, a presentation, a stack of attachments - and Heron reads it, returns clean structured data into NBS's portal, and flags anything that needs a human's eye. A commercial combined case that once ran up to 120 questions across multiple premises now returns in about two minutes. NBS discovered Heron through the Accelerant Marketplace - Accelerant's curated network of best-in-class partners, each thoroughly vetted for quality, performance and integration before an MGA ever sees them. "We wanted to remove the repetitive, manual tasks from our underwriting process so our underwriters could spend more time doing what they do best - underwriting risks rather than entering data." - Rachel Oldroyd, Operations Director, NBS The payoff is throughput: underwriters now clear 25-40% more cases a day, and, freed from the repetitive data entry, they like the work more for it. Because NBS can now accept manual submissions, more business finds its way to NBS. For one line of business, in the first three to four months, quote volume rose about 10% - and that number understates the impact, because a soft UK market had comparable lines running roughly 16% down over the same period. Turnaround tightened too: professional indemnity moved from about four days to two, and commercial combined from a day to half a day. None of it required adding headcount - the same team simply handles more. "We've seen underwriters doing between 25 and 40% more cases a day, because they've cut their underwriting time by about 50% on each case." - Rachel Oldroyd, Operations Director, NBS NBS projects that once every line runs through Heron, quote volume could climb 25% - an estimated £8-10 million of additional premium in the first twelve months. Heron is now central to how NBS plans to grow. It intends to roll Heron across all 40 of its products - no new product will go live without Heron built in - and it's developing a broker-facing chatbot widget that drops a submission straight to Heron and returns it ready to complete. About Heron. Heron automates submission intake and underwriting data for insurers, MGAs, brokers and lenders - reading documents in any format, screening them against appetite, and delivering clean, structured data into existing systems. herondata.io