Background-grade evidence at API speed.
The BID API extends with a Background Check Capability that prices the work of a counterparty dossier as a per-call primitive. Two dollars for an Identity Probe. Seven dollars for a Standard KYB. Twenty dollars for an Enhanced Composite that includes non-FCRA Criminal Intelligence. Every verdict ships with an FRE 902(14) self-authenticating evidence packet, anchored to CourtChain™, with a Sealed Escrow flush attestation that proves no PII was retained. The competitive frame is LexisNexis CLEAR, not Checkr or Sterling. We do not match CLEAR on data depth. We beat CLEAR on evidence, on price (60 to 80 percent below incumbent per-check pricing), and on integration time (an API key in minutes versus a six-figure annual subscription).
A seven-billion-dollar industry, built for a paper world.
Background checks in 2026 are split across three uneven layers. None of them ship cryptographic evidence. None of them flush PII after the verdict. All of them carry pricing that buyers stitch together across three to five vendors with overlapping coverage and no unified evidence packet.
Sterling, Checkr, First Advantage, GoodHire.
FCRA regulated. Per-check pricing ranges from $25 to $100 depending on depth. The high-volume but low-margin floor of the industry, anchored on county and state criminal data acquisition contracts. Heavy compliance overhead, slow integration, and a hardened consent and dispute apparatus.
Persona, Alloy, Trulioo, Onfido, Jumio.
Per-identity pricing usually $1.50 to $8.00 with a la carte enrichment. Strong on document liveness and identity probe. Thin on entity resolution depth, beneficial-owner traversal, and on the evidence chain that an auditor or regulator actually wants in their hands when the question gets asked.
ComplyAdvantage, LSEG World-Check, Dow Jones Risk Center.
Subscription based, $50,000 to $500,000-plus annually for institutional access. Coverage is real. Evidence is a PDF with a vendor logo on it. Pricing is opaque, bundled, and sized for the largest banks. Mid-market financial institutions and regional MCOs are categorically priced out of the same data.
Three structural problems run through every layer.
The category was built when a printed PDF was a credible artifact, when buyers had patience for a six-figure subscription cycle, and when persistent vendor-side files were treated as a feature rather than a liability. None of those assumptions still hold.
A PDF with a vendor logo is not court admissible.
Customers who later need to prove they performed a check, in litigation, audit, or regulatory exam, receive a paper trail that requires custodial testimony to admit. What is delivered is a report. What is needed is a record.
Pricing is opaque, bundled, and stitched.
A complete diligence flow assembles three to five vendors with overlapping coverage, no unified evidence packet, and no consistent identifier across results. The buyer pays the integration cost and inherits the inconsistencies.
Every vendor in the chain stores the subject indefinitely.
Each handoff in the chain creates another durable file with weak deletion guarantees. The breach surface scales with the number of vendors. Right-to-erasure compliance is at best a process commitment, never a cryptographic one.
Three tiers, one evidence packet.
The Background Check Capability is delivered as a REST and gRPC primitive inside the BID API. One endpoint, a configurable module list, a normalized verdict, and a CourtChain™-anchored evidence packet with a Sealed Escrow flush attestation on every call. Pricing is per call, with no minimum commit and no subscription floor.
$2.00 per call.
Identity verification only. Government IDs, document liveness, address verification. Designed to undercut the Persona and Alloy floor on per-identity verification and to seed the BID API as the default identity primitive in payment-network workflows.
- Government ID validation
- Document liveness
- Address normalization (USPS, postal)
- Entity resolution (single source)
- Evidence packet, CourtChain™ anchored
- Sealed Escrow flush attestation
$7.00 per call.
The sweet spot for B2B counterparty verification. Identity Probe plus full sanctions, PEP, and watchlist screening, plus entity resolution across multiple registries, plus beneficial-owner traversal up to two hops. The default tier on most production integrations.
- All Tier L1 modules
- Sanctions, PEP, watchlist (200-plus lists)
- Adverse media (basic lookback)
- Entity resolution (cross-source)
- Beneficial-owner traversal, two hops
- Evidence packet plus PoCS receipt
$20.00 per check.
Replaces a $200-plus stitched workflow. Standard KYB plus four-hop UBO, plus bankruptcy and litigation, plus extended adverse media, plus the non-FCRA Criminal Intelligence module. Head-to-head with LexisNexis CLEAR per-call equivalent at a fraction of the price.
- All Tier L3 modules
- Beneficial-owner traversal, four hops
- Bankruptcy and litigation (PACER plus state)
- Extended adverse media (730-day lookback)
- Criminal Intelligence (non-FCRA, purpose attested)
- Full evidence packet, FRE 902(14) certified
We do not beat LexisNexis on data depth. We beat them on evidence, price, and integration.
The BCC competes head to head with LexisNexis CLEAR (the investigations, due-diligence, and AML surface), not with the employment-screening side of LexisNexis or with Checkr and Sterling. CLEAR is the more lucrative and the less defended of the two LexisNexis surfaces. Our pitch is not "we have more data." Our pitch is "we have the right data with the right evidence at the right price."
| Vector | LexisNexis CLEAR | JIL BID BCC |
|---|---|---|
| Data depth on long-tail records | Best in class. Decades of acquisition contracts and 84B-plus records. | Honest tradeoff. We do not match CLEAR's tail on day one and we do not pretend to. |
| Identity resolution | LexID. Genuinely best in class on consumer matching. | Our entity resolver is good enough for 80 to 90 percent of counterparty cases. We win where the evidence chain matters more than identity-graph depth. |
| Court-admissible evidence | PDF report. Custodial testimony required to admit at trial. | FRE 902(14) self-authenticating, CourtChain™ anchored, with PoCS receipts for selective disclosure. |
| PII handling | Durable consumer files. Opaque retention. Right-to-erasure as a process promise. | Sealed Escrow with cryptographic flush attestation per call. PII does not durably reside in BCC services. |
| Pricing model | Subscription with $50,000 to $500,000-plus annual floors. | Per call, $2 to $20, no minimum commit. Credit packs available; volume step-downs at 1K, 10K, 50K, 200K monthly calls. |
| Integration time | Three to nine months of contracting and onboarding. | API key in minutes. The same path that any developer signing up to the BID API takes today. |
| Payment-network nativity | None. Standalone investigations product. | Embedded in the JIL L1 payment integrity flow. Wallet-to-entity resolution via the Wallet Intelligence Engine. Pre-Settlement and Pre-Clearance gates already wire through the same primitive. |
| Cryptographic posture | Classical only. | Hybrid Ed25519 plus Dilithium-III, ML-DSA-65 attestation, Kyber KEM, dual SHA-256 plus BLAKE3 hashing. Post-quantum bound from day one. |
| Audit defense | Manual e-discovery exercise. | One call to /bid/v1/bcc/verify. Returns proof in milliseconds without revealing inputs. |
FCRA scope is the central architectural decision. We did the work upstream.
The Fair Credit Reporting Act regulates Consumer Reporting Agencies. The trigger is purpose driven, not data driven. The same criminal record can be a consumer report when furnished for employment and not a consumer report when furnished for counterparty due diligence, KYB, fraud investigation, beneficial-owner verification, or AML compliance. The BCC is built to live on the right side of that line by design, not by policy promise.
JIL will not become a Consumer Reporting Agency under FCRA. The BCC is positioned as KYB plus counterparty verification plus sanctions and watchlist screening plus non-FCRA Criminal Intelligence, with FCRA-regulated content delivered exclusively through contracted CRA partners on a separate path. BID BCC Design Spec, v0.2
Cryptographically signed on every call.
The customer's permissible-purpose declaration is signed by the customer's API key on every Criminal Intelligence request. The declaration is included in the evidence packet and anchored to CourtChain™. If a regulator asks "did JIL know what this customer was using the data for," JIL produces the customer's signed attestation.
FCRA-scope requests are not served internally.
Employment, tenant, insurance, and consumer-credit purposes are not accepted by the internal Criminal Intelligence module. They are hard-routed to a contracted CRA partner (Checkr, Sterling, First Advantage, or Accurate Background) under that partner's existing FCRA compliance program.
Sealed Escrow flushes after every call.
JIL retains the evidence packet hash and the verdict, both keyed to a request ID, neither keyed to a consumer identity. A CRA, by statutory definition, assembles consumer files into reports. JIL produces single-shot verdicts. The architecture, not the policy, is the defense.
Begin a principal-level conversation.
The BCC is one of 301 production services already operating across the JIL reference mainnet, with 500+ production checks across sixteen signal categories, 1.5 million lines of production code, and 83 patent claims filed across attestation, evidence, and consensus. We are not pitching a roadmap. We are pricing capability that already runs.
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