Why All Business Data Matters: Seeing the Economy as It Actually Works

By Mike Grillo, EVP, Global Strategic Accounts, Markaaz

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After years of working with financial institutions, platforms, marketplaces, and regulators across regions, one pattern keeps repeating:

Most of the operational friction, risk exposure, and lost growth isn’t only caused by bad actors. It’s caused by missing businesses.

There’s an assumption embedded in many data strategies, often unspoken, that if a business isn’t formally registered and currently active, it doesn’t really count. In practice, that assumption doesn’t hold up. And the further you operate across borders and business types, the more obvious that becomes.

At Markaaz, what stands out isn’t how different markets are; it’s how consistently this blind spot appears everywhere.

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The Economy Is Bigger Than the Registers

The global economy doesn’t organize itself neatly around official registries. Businesses appear early, operate informally, pause, re‑emerge, change names, change owners, change structures, and move between formal and informal status over time.

International institutions have been saying this for years:

The International Labor Organization ILO and the United Nations Development Program UNDP estimate that around 80% of enterprises worldwide operate in the informal economy, employing more than 2 billion people.  

The World Bank notes that informal business activity exists in every economy, including advanced ones, and remains systematically underrepresented in official records.

This isn’t theoretical. You see it clearly in real workflows.

In the U.S., for example, millions of legitimate businesses operate as sole proprietors, DBAs, and contract‑based entities that never form corporations. Internationally, early‑stage and small enterprises often operate for years before formal registration, if they ever fully register at all.

They hire. They trade. They accept payments. They seek credit. They just don’t look like the businesses many datasets are designed to recognize.

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Where Traditional Business Data Breaks Down

Most legacy business datasets were designed around a narrow definition of legitimacy:

• Formally registered entities

• Actively filing businesses

• Current status only

That framing made sense when registries were the primary source of truth. But it struggles in real‑world operations.

When a business returns as “no match found,” it usually isn’t because the business doesn’t exist. More often, it’s because:

• The business is operating but unregistered

• The business is newly established

• The business is inactive but legitimate

• The business existed previously under a different structure or identifier

In high‑volume environments KYB, payments, lending, marketplaces, are the that gaps translate directly into manual work, delays, and inconsistent decisions. Industry analyses show that as much as 70% of KYB cases still fall into manual review, largely due to fragmented and incomplete business data.

From the outside, that looks like a compliance problem. In practice, it’s a data coverage problem.

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Businesses Have Lifecycles, Not Status Flags

One of the most consistent mismatches I see between data and reality is the idea that businesses are either active or gone. They aren’t. They form early, operate informally, register later, go dormant, reopen, change ownership, shut down, and sometimes reappear years later under related identities. Risk, continuity, and legitimacy are often visible only when that full arc is preserved.

Understanding informal and non‑observed businesses is essential to understanding real economic participation, not just regulatory compliance.

From a sales seat, the pattern is clear. The highest‑impact decisions are rarely made on point‑in‑time data alone. They depend on context.

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What Became Clear at Global Scale

Markaaz wasn’t built to “add more companies” to a database. It was built after seeing how often real businesses simply fell outside traditional visibility and to close that gap.

What emerged over time was a picture that aligns closely with global economic research and the additional coverage Markaaz offers:

• In the United States, there are tens of millions of unregistered businesses, many active today.

• Globally, hundreds of millions of businesses operate outside formal registries at any given point.

Historical and inactive records are not noise they’re often where identity reuse, ownership changes, and fraud signals surface. Once you see the economy this way, “no match found” stops looking like a data response and starts looking like a system failure.

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In conclusion

Most datasets show you the business economy as it’s easiest to measure.

The real business economy is messier. Businesses don’t wait for registration to start operating. They don’t disappear cleanly when they stop filing. And they don’t behave in ways that fit static models.

The most meaningful progress I’ve seen, across regions and industries, comes when data reflects that reality, instead of filtering it out.

That principle is what led to Markaaz. And it’s why we don’t leave businesses behind.

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Contact us to learn how Markaaz helps reduce KYB friction, improve coverage, or make business decisions with more complete data.

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