100 Years of Getting It Right

By Curtis Knuth

In 1926, a small office in Santa Maria, California, opened its doors as the Credit Bureau of Santa Maria. The people who founded it probably were not thinking about a 100-year anniversary. They were thinking about their neighbors, their community and the practical need to help local businesses make sound lending decisions. They were thinking about trust.

A century later, that original impulse is still the foundation of everything we do at Service 1st.

Credit reporting has been part of my family's story for generations. My father began his career with CBI, which eventually became Equifax, in 1961, and played a central role in digitizing the paper files that then powered the industry. When my family acquired what would become Service 1st in 2019, I came to understand the history of the space and was genuinely curious about what had kept this particular company relevant across so many decades, economic cycles and technological revolutions.

What I found was something simpler and more durable than any product or technology. A commitment to getting it right for the client, every time, without exception. That commitment predates me by about 90 years. My job is to honor it and extend it.

A century of change, one constant

The history of Service 1st is really the history of how credit information evolved in America. The Credit Bureau of Santa Maria was part of a national network of local credit bureaus that formed the backbone of consumer credit reporting in the mid-twentieth century. These were community institutions, staffed by people who knew their markets and took the responsibility of maintaining accurate, fair records seriously.

Over the decades that followed, the organization grew by bringing neighboring bureaus into the fold. Lompoc joined in 1975. Tulare County was incorporated in 1977. San Luis Obispo came aboard in 1980. Redding was acquired in 2008. Sacramento joined in 2010. In 2016, the affiliated companies of the original Santa Maria bureau came together to form Credit Data Solutions, LLC. And in 2019, NCS acquired Credit Data Solutions, which became Service First Information Solutions and operates as Service 1st.

Each of those moments represented a choice to grow while staying grounded. To bring more clients and more communities into the fold without losing sight of what made the original enterprise worth preserving in the first place.

What the mortgage industry taught us about verification

When my family took over, mortgage credit reporting was already our core business. What we found was a client base that was frustrated in ways they sometimes could not fully articulate. They were paying for information they were not always sure they could trust. They were absorbing the cost of fallout without any acknowledgment from their vendors that a loan falling out of the pipeline cost real money. They were managing multiple vendors, multiple workflows and multiple points of failure with no relief in sight.

We listened to that frustration and built our business around addressing it. Our cascade technology automatically sequences through more than 30 data sources, reducing the manual labor that had historically made income and employment verification expensive and slow. Our Income+ reports come with a built-in insurance wrapper and automatic buyback protection that require no enrollment and no extra steps. We developed our risk-sharing pricing model because we believe that if a loan does not fund, we should share in that outcome, not just collect our fee and move on.

We also became one of the few companies to hold the TRV trademark for tax return verification. When IRS pricing for 8821-based verification began climbing, our clients noticed that the partner they chose for TRV suddenly mattered a great deal. We had invested in that infrastructure for years precisely because we knew this moment was coming.

None of those decisions came from a spreadsheet exercise. They came from listening to clients and taking our responsibility to stand behind the work we do seriously.

Building in Hammonton

In November 2021, we moved our operations into newly purchased and renovated space in Hammonton, New Jersey. For those unfamiliar with Hammonton, it is a small town about an hour outside Philadelphia with a strong Italian American heritage, a deeply rooted community and a main street that has seen the same cycles of revitalization and struggle that small American towns have navigated for generations.

We chose Hammonton deliberately. There is something about a company that has survived for 100 years that naturally connects with a community that has been fighting for its own longevity. The people who work here are not just employees. They are neighbors, community members, people who have a stake in this place and in this company. That is not something you find on a job listing. It is something you build over time by showing up consistently and taking the long view.

Where we are going

Service 1st turns 100 years old this year, and the industry it serves is in the middle of one of the most significant periods of change it has ever seen. New credit-scoring options are reshaping how lenders approach qualification and verification. Automated income and employment verification is moving from a convenience to an expectation. IRS pricing changes are forcing lenders to make more deliberate choices about their TRV partners. The integration of verification services into loan origination systems is getting faster and more seamless, but also more complicated to manage.

We are not standing still. This year, we opened a new back-office fulfillment entity specifically for mortgage industry participants, expanding our capacity to support lenders at scale without compromising the personal service that has always been our differentiator. We are expanding into new verticals, including background screening for employers and property managers, and Medicaid eligibility verification, as new federal requirements are creating demand for employment and income verification outside traditional mortgage lending.

A hundred years is a long time. But it is also just a starting point. What I know from this history is that the companies that last are not the ones that were right about every trend or technology. They are the ones who were consistently trustworthy. They got the information right. They stood behind their work. They showed up for their clients when it was inconvenient, when the market was hard, and when the easy path would have been to cut corners.

That is the company we inherited and the company we intend to build on for the next 100 years.

Curtis Knuth is president and CEO of NCS and Service 1st, where he is responsible for the financial and strategic vision of both companies. He works closely with internal and external stakeholders to shape how NCS and Service 1st serve the clients and communities that have placed their trust in the firms. Service 1st is celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2026.