Bryan Crosby launches VeriQual to lessen loan backlogs and empower self-employed borrowers at the same time
“When you look at the amount of people that are getting into the non-W2 income pool, it's just growing every day. We want to support that growth, and break down one of the cons of entrepreneurship: income verification on the borrower and the bank side,” said founder Bryan Crosby.
Bryan Crosby has been a fixture in Knoxville’s entrepreneurial community since the early 2010s, long before the city’s startup infrastructure took shape. Back then, the network was small. He recalled a handful of investors: Jim Biggs, executive director of the Knoxville Entrepreneur Center (KEC), and a central connector, Tom Ballard, Teknovation‘s founder.
“I actually go back to the early 2010s with Tom Ballard. I’ve known Tom for a very long time, and he is certainly one of the entrepreneurship godfathers here. There was very little infrastructure in place back in those days, and it’s been crazy to watch Knoxville become a startup community,” said Crosby.
His first venture, Southeastern Packaging Technologies (SPT), was born from that original startup network. The company won the Innov865 ‘Startup Day’ in 2015 and has been running for more than a decade, owning over 26 patents.
Inspired by a personal problem
How did Crosby get to VeriQual, the income-qualification platform that he recently pitched at KEC’s ‘What’s the Big Idea’ pitch competition?
Crosby holds a full financial suite of licenses and has spent a decade navigating the startup world. Even so, income verification caught him off guard every time there was a life change or he went to better his business.
“Anybody who’s self-employed understands the difficulty that comes with trying to buy your first home, get business equipment financing or insurance. Last October, we had our third child and looked into adding onto our home. The whole idea of income verification just got to me for the last time,” said Crosby.
Pivoting to the institutional market
Today, VeriQual’s consumer-facing tool is built and ready. But recently, Crosby has seen even more use for his product on the institutional side.
“Of the $4 trillion in annual U.S. lending, roughly $800 billion goes to self-employed borrowers — a figure projected to reach $1 trillion by 2035. Despite that volume, the process hasn’t changed: each self-employed file takes an average of one week to process, costs lenders approximately $1,000 in manual review and still results in a 40% decline rate. VeriQual allows lenders to outsource that process entirely. A lender submits the file, VeriQual processes it and returns a clean, ingestible output that flows directly into underwriting and decisioning with no manual review required. Virtually every other step in a lender’s pipeline has already been automated or outsourced. This is the last step,” he explained.
The shift in focus has put Crosby one to two years ahead of where he expected to be. Building brand awareness nationwide for a consumer product is a heavy lift. Selling directly to banks and lenders is much more strategic. The audience is smaller, the need is clear and the path to market is shorter.
“Now, banks and lenders just need to give us a chance. We can prove, in a statistically significant way, that the system works. Just give us your most expensive and difficult-to-close files. We will export them back to you in an output that is designed to integrate with your existing operating systems for easy auditing,” said Crosby.
VeriQual is already conducting pilot testing with two regional banking partners. But, Crosby is always open to rolling out new pilots across the auto, commercial and mortgage sectors with dealerships, banks and lenders based in Knoxville and Chattanooga.
Built in Knoxville
Though Crosby has his sights set on scaling VeriQual nationally, he was quick to give credit back to his hometown.
He thanked co-founder and Chief Technology Security Officer (CTSO) John McNeely, who founded Sword and Shield Enterprise Security, for bringing more than two decades of cybersecurity experience to the platform.
VeriQual has also set up shop at the 121 Tech Hub, where lead engineer Russ James keeps a desk. Having this community and access to a tech-focused space has helped their venture greatly.
“I’m not a tech guy, which was one of my biggest concerns with this venture. I come from a completely different world. But I also knew that Knoxville did tech really, really well. It was so important for me to get connected with McNeely and Brandon Bruce, owner of 121. It just gets easier and easier to do something like this right here in our backyard because of all the hard work others have done to make Knoxville a startup community,” said Crosby.
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