Customer verification plays a vital role in ensuring the security and trustworthiness of online transactions. As businesses continue to operate in the digital landscape, the need for reliable identity verification process becomes increasingly important. In this article, we will delve into the customer verification process, explore the benefits of customer verification APIs, discuss the significance of customer verification services, and introduce effective customer verification solutions.
What is the customer verification process?
Customer verification is the procedure used to confirm the identity and authenticity of individuals engaging in online activities, such as opening accounts, making purchases, or accessing sensitive information. This process typically involves the collection and validation of personal data provided by customers, including but not limited to their name, address, date of birth, identification documents, and additional signals such as biometrics.
The customer verification process usually consists of the following steps:
Data collection
Customers are required to provide their personal information through an online form or application.
Data validation
The provided information is validated and cross-checked with reliable data sources to ensure its accuracy and authenticity.
Identity verification
The customer's identity is verified using various methods, including a high-assurance method of comparing identification documents with biometric data.
Risk assessment
For more regulated use cases, such as opening an account with a Financial Services provider, additional checks are performed to assess the risk associated with the customer, including screening against watchlists for PEPs and sanctions checks, or fraud databases.
Decisioning
Based on the collected data and verification results, a decision is made to either approve or decline the customer's request or transaction.
What are customer verification services?
Customer verification services are comprehensive solutions offered by specialized providers to help businesses establish trust, minimize fraud, and comply with regulatory requirements. These services typically encompass a range of verification methods and tools designed to suit different industries and use cases.
Key features and benefits of customer verification services include:
Multi-channel verification
Services that support multiple channels (web, mobile, etc.) enable businesses to verify customers seamlessly across different platforms, enhancing the user experience.
Global coverage
Verification services often have access to extensive global data sources, allowing businesses to verify customers from various regions and countries.
Fraud prevention
Advanced fraud detection mechanisms and algorithms are employed to identify suspicious activities and potential fraudulent behavior, protecting businesses from financial losses.
Compliance support
Customer verification services are designed to help businesses comply with regulations such as Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) requirements.
Enhanced security
By implementing robust verification methods, such as biometrics or document authentication, customer verification services strengthen security measures and prevent identity theft.
Onfido offers businesses fair, fast and accurate customer verification services using a wide range of identity verification processes. Build trust with your customers using a flexible, end-to-end identity verification platform. Powered by Atlas™ AI, our Real Identity Platform allows you to orchestrate award-winning document and biometric verifications, trusted data sources, and fraud detection signals.
Examples of customer identity verification solutions
Customer verification solutions encompass a range of tools, technologies, and software applications that assist businesses in performing efficient and reliable customer verification processes. These solutions are often customizable, allowing organizations to tailor the verification workflow to their specific needs.
Key elements of effective customer verification solutions include:
Automated workflows
Solutions like Onfido Studio provide automated workflows that streamline the verification process, reducing manual effort and enabling faster decision-making.
Intelligent document processing
Advanced optical character recognition (OCR) and document analysis technologies are utilized to extract relevant data from identification documents, ensuring accuracy and efficiency.
Biometric verification
Solutions may incorporate biometric technologies such as facial recognition or fingerprint matching to validate the customer's identity against their provided documents.
Watchlist screening
Integration with watchlist databases enables businesses to screen customers against PEPs and sanctions plus adverse media lists, enhancing risk assessment capabilities.
Reporting and analytics
Customer verification solutions often offer comprehensive reporting and analytics features, providing businesses with insights into verification performance and trends.
Identity verification API
An identity verification API (Application Programming Interface) is a powerful tool that enables businesses to integrate automated customer verification capabilities directly into their existing systems or applications. By leveraging a customer verification API, organizations can streamline and enhance their identity verification processes while maintaining a seamless user experience.
APIs have benefits over and above building a customer verification solution in-house, saving businesses the resources needed to become an expert in identity verification. The benefits of using an identity verification API include:
Efficiency
Leveraging existing solutions and vendors saves costs and resources over dedicating headcount from your own business.
Scalability
API-driven solutions can easily scale to accommodate growing verification needs, making them suitable for businesses of all sizes.
Flexibility
APIs can be customized and tailored to fit specific business requirements, ensuring a seamless integration with existing workflows and systems. Businesses have more control over the UX without being ‘locked in,’ and just need to make sure the right data is sent and received.
Regulatory compliance
Customer verification APIs often incorporate compliance checks, ensuring businesses meet regulatory standards and mitigate risk.
What are the differences between a customer identity verification API and SDK?
Whether you’re integrating from scratch, or have a full customer verification experience built into your product or service, there are a number of benefits to integrating with an SDK over an API: SDKs are typically easier to integrate, provide a smoother user experience for customers, and prevent more fraud. Here's how:
Easier integration
Using off-the-shelf solutions can speed up the process of integrating customer verification into your user experience. Instead of building the user journey from scratch, businesses can leverage off-the-shelf SDKs and plug them directly into an application.
Onfido’s Smart Capture SDKs are available out-of-the-box across iOS, Android, Web, React Native, and Flutter, with configurable screens and user interface elements to help businesses build in line with their brand.
User Experience
Customer verification SDKs are typically designed to solve the specific needs of the verification user journey; each screen is specifically crafted to guide users through the process and is built based on feedback from the UX businesses across the world.
Onfido Smart Capture walks your customers through the verification process, providing real-time feedback on blur, glare, lighting, and positioning with on-screen prompts as they take selfies, videos and images of their documents. AI-guided image capture reduces rejections by up to 70%, helping customers glide through verification at the first try.
Fraud Prevention
For businesses who want to go a layer deeper in their fraud detection, SDKs are a powerful tool, ensuring higher quality image capture and leveraging on-device technologies.
We’ve built our SDKs to ensure high quality first-time submissions from customers, which gives our AI more detailed imagery to work with compared with API-first approaches that provide little to no feedback or image enhancement. Onfido Smart Capture also enriches fraud prevention by reading on-device signals to flag injection attacks, emulators, fake webcams, and more, where these might be missed by an API-only integration.
The importance of customer identity verification
Customer verification is a critical process for businesses operating in the digital landscape. By implementing robust customer verification practices, leveraging APIs or SDKs, utilizing verification services, and adopting effective solutions, organizations can establish trust, mitigate risks, and ensure regulatory compliance. Embracing customer verification empowers businesses to build secure and reliable digital ecosystems that protect both their customers and their brand reputation.
As a leading provider in the field of customer verification, Onfido offers a comprehensive and innovative solution that combines cutting-edge technology with human expertise. With our award-winning AI, the Onfido Real Identity Platform enables businesses to verify customer identities accurately and efficiently. By leveraging document verification, facial biometrics, and liveness detection, Onfido ensures a seamless and secure verification process while maintaining a frictionless user experience. Trusted by more than 900 global organizations, Onfido's customer verification solution is designed to combat fraud, comply with regulatory requirements, and build trust with customers. With Onfido, businesses can confidently navigate the digital landscape and establish a secure and reliable environment for their customers.
Take an interactive tour and demo of the Onfido Real Identity Platform and explore its benefits and features, trying out Onfido Studio workflow builder.
