In wake of increasing online identity theft, businesses need to incorporate a solid identity verification system for their customers. These frauds only prevail when businesses at the time of customer onboarding do not practice the required identity verification services. After experiencing a sea of online frauds, businesses are now using sophisticated verification processes for identifying their customers. Document verification services are increasing in popularity for verifying the identity of consumers.
There are various ways like ID documents, biometrics, address verification, and others through which vendors can ensure that only legitimate individuals become their consumers. These verification methods are used based on the type of industry employing them. There is a rise in businesses that are identifying their customers based on document verification services.
Document verification refers to the process of verifying individuals based on their government-issued ID documents. It benefits the merchants to eliminate the risk of facing any kind of fraud that may be caused by fraudsters. Who would not like to onboard customers that would add value to their business and would become a fortune for their name? This good story can only begin if the businesses take the first step right by involving honest people.
There are many ways fraudsters try to manipulate documents for the sake of doing identity theft-like crimes. Modified documents can be created by altering information in genuine documents. Falsely presented documents are genuine ones but do not belong to individuals claiming them. Illegitimate documents are entirely false documents.
Process of Document Verification
Getting document verification done is as easy as using the internet has become. The only thing that the businesses ask from customers is to submit their government-issued ID document at the time of registration. The software detects the originality of the document by extracting information through state-of-the-art Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The document is also checked to verify if it is forged or photoshopped or the corners of the documents are folded.
An additional way of verification through documents is required where the customer is asked to provide live image capture of their face. The provided photo of the customer is cross-matched against the image on the document to verify that the document belongs to that customer.
The document verification process checks information like name, age, address of the customer, date of issuance, and expiry of the document. Other document features like stamps, fonts, watermarks, and others are also verified during the process.
Types of Documents Used For Identity Verification
Almost any type of document can be used to verify the identity of the consumer. Following are some types:
- ID document
- Driving licenses
- Passports
- Employee letter
- Bank statement
- Rent agreement
Before the development of advanced technology, the traditional methods of document verification used to be tedious and required a long time to verify. Those conventional methods also possessed chances of error because of them being done by humans. On the other hand, electronic methods of verification have eased the process for both the vendors and the customers by reducing the chances of errors in them. The digital process also eliminated the customers’ physical effort of going to the offices to get their document verification done.
How can document verification be Used to Verify the Address of the Customer?
Document verification solution is particularly used by the industries involved in delivering products. It is helpful for them to avoid facing shipment problems. During address verification, the customer is required to submit a secondary document containing a business or residential address along with the ID document.
Advantages of Document Verification
There are a lot of benefits attached to the process of document verification as follows:
- A major reason for having any verification process in the business is to eradicate chances of online fraud in it. As far as documents are concerned, their realness can be verified by checking data consistency in it.
- The fact that document verification can happen over the internet has reduced the manual labor in it. The digital process can get completed in seconds.
- AI-driven document verification process ensures that you are who you say you are. Regulatory compliance like Financial Action Task Force (FATF) developed certain regulatory checks like Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money laundering (AML) to ensure the identity of customers.
- Digital Document verification along with facial recognition proves to be a better way to authenticate the document. In this, the photo of the customer is verified against the image on the document.
- Document verification can prevent transaction frauds from happening in the industries. The document when going through verification processes also confirms that it belongs to the individual claiming its identity.
Conclusion
Online frauds can be reduced to a minimum when the identity of the customer is verified. Document verification proves to be a helpful tool for businesses to verify identity especially for industries that deliver goods. The robust online services have reduced manual labor by producing authentic results.
