How we handle your information

What we collect

• Contact details: your name, title, email, and phone.
• Business information: your business’s legal name, structure, EIN, home state, address, NAICS code, size, the buyer or jurisdiction you want to do business with, and your answers to the pre-qualification and business profile questions.
• Documents you upload: tax returns, certificates of good standing, formation and ownership records, affiliate disclosures, payroll reports, financial statements, bank statements, and certifications. These can include personal information about owners, such as names, ownership percentages, and, on some tax forms, Social Security numbers.
• Payment information: payments are handled by Stripe. We never see or store your full card number.
• Referral information: the partner organization you applied through, if any.
• Technical information: cookies that keep you signed in to your application or portal. We don’t use advertising or tracking cookies.

How we use it

• To verify whether your business meets the small business standard you chose, and to issue, renew, and confirm your letter.
• To contact you about your application, requests for information, decisions, appeals, and renewals.
• To prepare your Business Gap Report and match your business with resources.
• To list approved businesses in the ISB Verified directory, unless you turn your listing off.
• To prevent fraud, keep the site secure, and meet legal obligations.

Document reading and artificial intelligence

To fill in your application, your documents may be read by a secure document-reading service that uses artificial intelligence. The service processes your documents in the United States, does not use them to train AI, and deletes them within 30 days. You review everything it finds before you submit, and you can correct anything that’s wrong.

Software never makes a decision about your business. A real person reviews your file, checks the details against your documents, and decides.

Who sees your information

• The ISB Verified team sees your full file, including your documents. Every time staff open a document, it is recorded.
• The partner organization you applied through sees your business name, home state, application date, and status. It sees your Business Gap Report only if you choose to share it, and you can stop sharing at any time. It never sees your documents or answers.
• Invited buyers and partner organizations using the directory see your business name, city, state, NAICS code, industry type, the standard applied, and your letter’s valid-through date. You can turn your listing off at any time.
• Anyone with your verification ID or QR code can confirm that your letter is valid, the standard applied, and its valid-through date.
• Service providers that run the site for us, only to provide their service: website hosting (Vercel), database (Neon), file storage and email (Amazon Web Services), payments (Stripe), and document reading (Anthropic).

We don’t sell your personal information or share it for advertising. Buyers and partner organizations never see your documents, tax returns, or answers.

Thrive

Approved businesses receive an invitation to a free Thrive subscription. We send you the link; joining is your choice, and we don’t send your application information to Thrive.

How we protect it

Documents are stored encrypted in private storage, and only ISB Verified staff can open them. Access to applications is limited to the people who need it, and staff actions are logged.

How long we keep it

We keep your application and documents while your verification, and any renewal, appeal, or request for information, is active. After that, we keep them only as long as we need to for legal, tax, and record-keeping obligations. You can ask us to delete your information, and we will unless the law requires us to keep it.

Your choices

• Turn your directory listing on or off from your status page.
• Share or stop sharing your Business Gap Report with your partner organization from your status page.
• Ask to see, correct, or delete your information by emailing followup@isbverified.com with your tracking or verification ID.

Children

ISB Verified is for businesses whose owners are all 18 or older. We don’t knowingly collect information from children.

Changes and contact

If we change this policy, we’ll update the date at the top. If a change is significant, we’ll tell applicants with an open application by email.

Questions: followup@isbverified.com