Yesterday, ActiveProspect announced a significant strategic acquisition: Verisk Marketing Solutions (VMS) — the business unit formed around Jornaya and Infutor — from Verisk Analytics. The move instantly reshapes the competitive dynamics in the consent verification, identity resolution, and marketing intelligence space.
This isn’t just another mid-tier acquisition; it signals a consolidation of two of the largest products historically competing for “truth and consent” validation in digital lead flows. TrustedForm and Jornaya have long offered alternative approaches to verifying consumer consent and understanding consumer intent. With this deal, the lines between them blur — and one becomes dominant.
What Happened: A Quick Recap
Verisk sold its marketing solutions business — which includes Jornaya and Infutor’s identity data capabilities — to ActiveProspect, expanding the latter’s scope beyond pure consent verification and into broader identity resolution and consumer insights. Verisk says the sale lets it refocus on its core insurance analytics business, while ActiveProspect frames it as a convergence of shared missions around trust and privacy.
What This Means for the Industry
1. Near-Total Market Control in Consent Verification
TrustedForm has been the de facto gold standard in documenting express consent for TCPA compliance, with hundreds of millions of leads certified annually. Jornaya, by contrast, differentiated itself with identity data and consumer journey insights. Now, both methodologies sit under one roof.
Risk: Clients who chose Jornaya explicitly because it differed from TrustedForm now have that choice effectively removed. Consolidation often leads to harmonization — which can mean forced migrations, unified APIs, or platform deprecation over time. For companies that prefer one methodology over another, the loss of choice could reduce innovation and inflate costs.
Benefit (the argument you’ll see from AP): A unified system could streamline integrations and reduce fragmentation in compliance tooling.
My take: This is a classic consolidation play that reduces competition — and consumers (especially high-volume lead buyers) rarely benefit from reduced choice.
2. The Risk of Stifled Innovation
Both TrustedForm and Jornaya evolved partly because they were competing — each trying to outdo the other in accuracy, integration, and regulatory defensibility. With competition gone, incentives change.
Potential downside:
- Slower feature development targeted at niche use cases
- Higher prices as bargaining power shifts toward the platform owner
- Longer timelines for addressing edge case compliance complexities
Too often in tech consolidation, “one platform to rule them all” means a lowest common denominator product roadmap, especially as products are merged or unified.
3. Regulatory Implications Remain Complex
ActiveProspect will likely echo privacy and compliant intent capture messaging. But turning consent capture into identity resolution at scale attracts attention — and possibly scrutiny — as regulators tighten rules around cookies, tracking, and consumer permissioning.
Expect:
- More emphasis on privacy-first positioning
- Greater investment in compliance tooling
- Tighter integration between consent logs and identity graphs
But with dominant market position comes greater visibility — and potentially more regulatory pressure.
4. Customer Impact: Transition Risks
For current Jornaya clients:
- Uncertainty around support lifecycles and roadmap commitments
- Migration to ActiveProspect’s ecosystem could be slow and disruptive
- Contract renegotiations may reflect the shift in negotiating leverage
For the broader industry:
- Tools that integrated with both platforms will now have a single integration partner to manage — which might simplify development workflows but also centralizes risk.
5. Consolidation Isn’t Always Elimination — But It Often Feels Like It
Some argue the opposite: the deal could accelerate innovation by combining identity insights with consent verification on a unified platform. From the buyer’s perspective, one vendor with a more comprehensive “Trust + Identity” stack sounds efficient.
But there’s a real difference between one suite vs. one choice.
When competitive alternatives dwindle, customers lose leverage. Pricing power shifts. Customization options shrink. Over time, the industry becomes less agile.
Here is the bottom line here, this acquisition marks a key inflection point in the lead generation and consent verification market. It closes a chapter where trusted consent and consumer journey insights were developed along parallel paths. Instead, we’ve entered a phase where scale and centralization matter more than differentiation.
For buyers and vendors alike, this is no time to stay idle. Evaluate your dependence on single-vendor stacks. Consider diversification strategies. And most importantly, advocate for transparent migration paths and competitive alternatives.
The lead compliance and identity space just got smaller — and as history has shown us, that rarely bodes well for customers.