Perfect company list

Database filters fail in two directions at once.

• They miss real fits. Industry labels are self-reported, or guessed: many LinkedIn company pages carry the banner "This listing was automatically created by LinkedIn", which means nobody at the company picked the label. We found an FDIC bank listed as Construction, an SEC-registered wealth manager listed as Semiconductor Manufacturing, and a New Jersey school district listed as Retail Luxury Goods and Jewelry.
• They pull in junk. A plain Banking + United States filter returned 16,895 companies. About 10,500 of them were not banks: 3,679 mortgage companies and lenders, 2,414 credit unions, 2,210 dead sites or unrelated businesses (a Toyota dealer, a pawn and gun shop, a youth soccer club), 839 vendors that sell to banks, and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

The fix is not a better filter. It is: use filters to cast a wide net, and use AI to decide who is in it. Judging is now cheap enough that pulling five times too many companies costs almost nothing.

The workflow