Document Verification: Essential Steps To Avoid Identity Frauds

The process of determining whether a document, such as a bank statement, employment record, business document, etc., is authentic or not is known as document verification. Many companies use document verification in conjunction with other techniques of identity verification as part of their overall identity verification operations.

The word “document verification” is most frequently used to refer to online or digital document verification, while it can take place in both physical and digital settings.

What is document verification?

In order to create an account, the user must provide information about themselves. The individual’s name, address, date of birth, SSN, and other details may be included in this data, which can differ from business to business.

The user is next requested to submit one or more papers that can validate the information provided, as necessary. For instance, a piece of mail may be asked for in order to confirm the person’s address, and a birth certificate may be asked for in order to confirm the person’s age and date of birth. The authenticity and non-forgery of the submitted document are confirmed.

If the document can be correctly validated, it may serve as proof that the information given by the person is accurate.

Importance Of document verification

By confirming the legitimacy of ID documents throughout the customer onboarding process, document verification can assist businesses in rapidly and securely verifying new clients. This is crucial for businesses that frequently handle high-value transactions, such banks, financial institutions, and cryptocurrency firms. When examining and validating new account applications, organisations like these need to be absolutely certain of who they are transacting business with.

The process of document verification involves scanning official documents like bank statements, driver’s licences, and passports to look for a variety of security features like holograms, watermarks, stamps, fonts, and other features. Additionally, the documents’ personal information, like name, date of birth, and address, can be verified against other data sources. This is especially important for businesses supplying age-restricted goods and services, like wine merchants or automobile rental agencies.

The document verification process has changed as more customers connect with businesses online. When creating a new account today, it’s not unusual to be asked to provide identification documents as well as a photo or a little video to demonstrate similarity. Consumers anticipate a speedy or even real-time transaction, but delivering this at scale can be difficult for financial institutions. A staff team is frequently needed to manually check ID documents.

Identification fraud techniques progress in tandem with improvements in identity verification. Both sides are always innovating in this never-ending race, but technology always gives the good guys the upper hand. Due to the burden on personnel, the poor customer onboarding experience, and the need to combat fraud, many organisations are investigating how manual document verification can be automated.

Benefits Of document verification

Online document verification can assist your company in a number of significant ways. Online document verification allows you to:

Comply with legal requirements: You could be compelled by legislation to confirm the identification of new users, depending on the sector of the economy your business operates in. Verifying documents is a widely used and very effective way to comply with legal requirements.

Preventing fraud on your platform: Even though it is not legally required for you to do so, doing so can assist you reduce the likelihood of identity theft and other types of fraud (such fraudulent account creation) on your platform.

Increasing customer trust: Integrating identity verification into your onboarding procedure can significantly increase customers’ trust in your platform or company. The conclusion is that it is more difficult for bad actors to evade detection and potentially do harm because all users have completed the same authentication.

Faster customer onboarding: Online document verification can often be finished in a matter of seconds when combined with automation. This is far quicker than manual evaluation, which can generally take days or weeks, depending on the particular procedures utilised.