How Coverbase launched customer-ready screening in a week

When Risk Checks Hold Products Back

For startups and scaleups, a product that needs risk checks can be too costly or slow to pursue. Getting it to market can mean enterprise sales negotiations, annual contracts or minimum spend, followed by integration, testing and maintenance. For teams that cannot justify that investment in an unproven product, promising ideas never see the light of day.

Coverbase's financial-services customers needed to know whether a vendor was someone they could legally do business with. Sanctions checks help identify prohibited counterparties, including through ownership. For example, under U.S. sanctions rules, a supplier majority-owned by a Russian individual on the U.S. blocked-persons list is itself blocked. Checking the supplier’s name alone can miss that risk.

Previously, customers had to bring their own screening provider to Coverbase. Coverbase could connect to that provider through the customer’s account, or customers could run checks separately and bring the results into their assessment. The burden of arranging screening still fell on the customer.

Those integrations brought poor documentation and unreliable connections. Getting help was another obstacle: established providers prioritized their largest accounts, leaving smaller partnerships like Coverbase struggling for attention. Coverbase needed a provider that would invest in the partnership and help it deliver screening directly to customers.

Why Coverbase Chose Minerva

Clarence had worked with Minerva at Unit21, the financial-crime prevention company he co-founded. His positive experience with the team gave him confidence in choosing Minerva again for Coverbase.

Minerva also fit Coverbase’s goal of keeping screening out of the customer’s way. Checks on a vendor, its directors and company leaders run within the assessment. When a potential match appears, the team sees the matching record and the reason it was flagged, with evidence to investigate and explain its decision to regulators.

From Integration to First Customer

Coverbase completed the integration in three to four hours. Minerva's documentation supported development with coding agents. Support for separate customer environments spared Coverbase the engineering work of building that separation itself.

The main work after integration was helping the first customer test and review the results. Coverbase used examples it expected to flag to demonstrate the checks. In a week, the first customer was using the service. Coverbase had added a paid service to its platform, with customers billed per screening.

Vendor Diligence in One Workflow

Customers can now turn on screening inside Coverbase without arranging a separate provider contract. Checks run as part of the vendor assessment, removing the export, screen and re-upload steps for teams previously using a separate tool.

Screening evidence stays with the vendor assessment, giving customers a fuller view of each vendor alongside security and other risk findings. Coverbase sees an opportunity to use that combined evidence to automate more of the assessment.

Make More Product Ideas Possible

Coverbase brought a paid screening service to market in a week. Minerva is drawing on that experience to give startups and scaleups the tools to build screening into their own products, with expert support when they need it.

Early access to Minerva's self-serve platform is now available. Teams can add risk checks to products they would otherwise shelve because of the engineering time involved.

Minerva’s broader platform also supports identity verification, business due diligence and beneficial ownership research to identify the people behind a company. That extends the opportunity to more products with risk and compliance requirements.