NCS Analytics and CRB Monitor Link Cannabis Licensing Data With Operational Intelligence

NCS Analytics and CRB Monitor announced a strategic partnership on August 20, 2026, that joins two of the cannabis industry’s core data infrastructures: CRB Monitor’s licensing and corporate-ownership database with NCS’s real-time operational analytics, in a combination the companies say is aimed at banks, lenders, and regulators that work with licensed cannabis businesses, according to the companies’ announcement.

Under the arrangement, NCS will be able to connect a cannabis business’s identity and what it is licensed to do with how that business is actually operating in real time. CRB Monitor, in turn, will place its licensing, location, and entity data into workflows spanning the compliance and credit lifecycle, linking the regulatory record to operational reality. The two firms say the combined offering is built to expand how financial institutions handle due diligence, lending and underwriting, portfolio management, regulatory oversight, compliance, and risk management.

“Understanding what is actually happening at a cannabis business takes more than just one, two, or even a dozen data streams,” said Adam Crabtree, founder and CEO of NCS Analytics. “The licensing data we are seeing from CRB Monitor provides an important foundation for understanding who is authorized to operate.”

Steven Kemmerling, CEO and founder of CRB Monitor, framed the partnership as closing the gap between the two questions lenders have historically had to answer separately. CRB Monitor answers who a licensed business is, what it is licensed to do, and where it operates, he said, while NCS’s predictive and behavioral analytics answer how well that business is operating — so that, in his words, stakeholders can finally get to the question they have really been asking: “Is this a business we can afford to work with?”

How the Two Data Sets Fit Together

The partnership pairs two distinct layers of cannabis market data that have mostly existed apart. CRB Monitor, founded in 2014, maintains a relational database of cannabis-related businesses that it says covers more than 265,000 cannabis licenses, over 100,000 business entities, and more than 155,000 individual owners, de-duplicated and cross-linked so institutions can trace relationships between licenses, entities, and beneficial owners. Banks and credit unions use it for customer due diligence and the ongoing monitoring that federal anti-money-laundering rules require of any institution serving the industry.

NCS, founded in Denver in 2015, works from the other direction. Its platform ingests the operational data cannabis businesses are legally required to report to state track-and-trace systems and runs it through predictive and behavioral analytics: real-time anomaly detection, risk scoring, and alerts built for regulatory oversight and anti-money-laundering compliance. The company says it monitors thousands of licenses across multiple states and processes more than 89 million records weekly.

Combined, the two data sets let an institution answer both halves of the cannabis underwriting problem at once: confirming a counterparty is a real, properly licensed operator with known owners, and seeing whether its reported activity matches what it is actually doing. The companies say the work spans the full credit lifecycle, from initial due diligence through ongoing portfolio monitoring.

A Three-Product Buildout at NCS

The partnership lands in the middle of a deliberate product expansion at NCS aimed squarely at cannabis lending. NCS launched its Risk Index in 2025, its newest analytic tool, per the companies’ announcement. NCS says it monitors thousands of licenses across multiple states (18,000+ commercial licenses per its website).

In April 2026, NCS launched NCS Thea, a lending intelligence platform that converts government-verified operational data into a composite score and operational profile for banks and credit unions. In July 2026 it made Thea available as a standalone product, so lenders could buy the lending intelligence without subscribing to the full compliance suite. The CRB Monitor partnership adds the identity and licensing layer to that stack, the who and where beneath Thea’s how.

The Market Behind the Numbers

The timing tracks with what the licensing data itself shows about the industry’s shape.

The companies described the partnership as a shared commitment to transparency — giving institutions reliable data on who a cannabis business is licensed to be and how it is operating — as more lenders weigh entry into a market where borrower-reported financials have long been the only option.