Detected Report Reveals $10.4bn 'Collection Ceiling' Cost for North American SMB Onboarding

Detected has released a major report identifying a "Collection Ceiling" that costs the North American financial sector up to $31.7 billion annually. For fintech professionals, the findings highlight a structural flaw in SMB onboarding: 57% of required data points cannot be retrieved from registries, forcing a reliance on manual merchant attestations that drive high abandonment rates.

What was announced

Detected, the Trust Platform, launched "The Collection Ceiling" on 18th August 2026. The report details the inherent limitations of business registries in the United States and Canada, arguing that a significant portion of Know Your Business (KYB) data—such as true ownership, trading locations, and signing authority—exists above a "Collection Ceiling" where information is never officially recorded by governments.

According to the report’s field-level assessment, approximately 57% of the data points needed to onboard a North American SMB merchant are "attestation-only." This creates a manual loop where financial institutions must request information directly from the business, leading to significant delays. The report estimates the annual cost of this friction to the North American market at $10.4 billion, with a potential range reaching $31.7 billion. The primary driver of this cost is not internal labor, but the loss of revenue from applications abandoned during the onboarding process.

The findings also contrast jurisdictional policies, noting that while Canadian federal registries provide searchable beneficial ownership data, Delaware LLCs remain structurally opaque. This issue is compounded by a recent US Treasury ruling on 11 August 2026, which removed Corporate Transparency Act reporting requirements for domestic entities, ensuring that manual ownership verification will remain a necessity for the foreseeable future. The report highlights that Navan, by utilizing Detected’s platform, reduced its average onboarding time from 52 days to just one day, achieving 98% faster decisions across 99 countries.

"The industry has spent the last decade trying to make the retrievable half of KYB faster, cheaper and more automated, but nobody has properly measured the information that simply isn't there. You can build a better API, aggregate more sources and deploy increasingly sophisticated AI, but none of those things can retrieve information that was never collected in the first place. That is the Collection Ceiling. Above it, the only source of truth is often the business itself. We need to stop pretending this is a temporary operational inconvenience and start treating it as a structural feature of how SMB onboarding works."

Liam Chennells at Detected

The companies involved

Detected is a London-based fintech known as the Trust Platform, specializing in streamlining the KYB process for global organizations. The company focuses on bridging the gap between automated data retrieval and the necessary merchant attestations required for compliance and underwriting. By providing a unified platform, they aim to solve the friction points identified in their latest research.

Navan, formerly known as TripActions, is a major player in the travel and expense management space. The company provides a comprehensive platform for business travel, corporate cards, and expense management, serving a global client base. Navan has been an early adopter of advanced onboarding technologies to manage its rapid international expansion. The US Treasury, the executive department responsible for promoting economic prosperity and ensuring the financial security of the United States, also features prominently in the report due to its recent regulatory shifts regarding corporate transparency. These policy decisions directly influence the "Collection Ceiling" by determining what data is available in the public domain versus what must be collected manually by private institutions.

What FF News has reported before

FF News has closely followed the evolution of Navan as it expands its technological capabilities and global footprint. Recent coverage includes the company's efforts to enhance its travel infrastructure, such as when Navan Upgrades Singapore Airlines Partnership with Direct NDC Connection for Business Travel. We have also reported on their integration of sophisticated security measures, notably when Navan Partners with DataVisor to Secure Real-Time Travel and Expense Payments with AI. Furthermore, the company has focused on user control and data analysis, as seen in Navan Launches Granular Policy Controls to Optimize Global Business Travel Spend and their move toward advanced AI with the report that Navan Launches Model Context Protocol to Revolutionize AI-Driven Travel and Expense Analysis.

What this means

This report is a sobering reality check for the "automation-first" narrative in fintech. It suggests that no matter how advanced an AI or API becomes, the industry is hitting a hard wall built by government policy. The $10.4 billion cost of the "attestation layer" puts immense pressure on traditional banks and payment processors who still rely on legacy, high-friction onboarding flows. As the US Treasury relaxes transparency requirements, the competitive advantage will shift toward companies that can manage the "manual loop" elegantly rather than those just seeking more data sources. Watch for a shift in vendor selection, where the ability to handle merchant-provided data becomes as critical as the ability to ping a government database.