Complete Guide of Online Document Verification Process
Identity of onboarding customers must be verified for securing online platforms. Now scammers target online platforms for financial crimes. Identity theft and account takeover are the latest strategies used for malicious activities. The easy way for identity proof is by the document verification process.
Document Verification Process
The onboarding can be easily verified through documentation verification. Now, most websites use a robust document verification process that is done through online software. Now businesses can verify their customers remotely completely eradicating the manual procedures. The process is carried through the below three steps:
Capture
The user gives his personal information to the business’s website by filling the enrollment form. Then the user uploads or captures the image of the document that is needed for verification such as an ID card. There is no need for any special camera for that, phone camera or webcam can be used for capturing the image.
Extract
The required information is extracted from the document like name, DOB, and address. It depends on the type of document that is needed for extraction. Documents like medical certificates or insurance statements have more information to extract. In the case of identity verification, only personal information is required.
OCR technology is used for converting typewritten, printed or handwritten documents into the soft form or simply converting documents into digital form. In document authentication, it is used for data extraction. Initially, OCR was designed to extract data from grey-scale or black&white pictures but the latest form of it can extract coloured documents also.
Screen
The format and information of the document are verified in this step. After extracting the information from the document, the software verifies the information with the previously provided data. The software is empowered with multilingual support that enables it to extract and verify the documents in about any language.
The authenticity of the documents is also checked against forgery, fake or modified documents in the document verification process. Fraudsters steal documents of other users and try to impersonate them in the online verification process. The software checks for the holograms, stamps and signatures in the documents to eliminate any chances of fake documents.
Identification vs Authentication
Normally users confuse between identification and authentication, but they both are completely different concepts. Identification is just asking the information and authentication is verifying that information.
Identification is the first step in document verification. The user just gives his information like name or email in this step. Answers of the questions like “who are you” or “what is your address” are answered in identification.
Verification is the second step of the document verification. In this step, the verification of the given information is done. It is checked that the user is the same who he pretends to be like a user on an online platform is signed up by verifying the username and password.
Use Cases of Document Verification
Identity Verification
The verification of the identities of onboarding users of simply KYC (Know Your Customer) can be done through documents. Only government-issued authentic documents should be used for KYC. This will help in combating identity theft and account takeover.
Age Verification
Online pharmacies or gambling sites need to verify the age of buyers and players respectively. If any minor gets access to age-restricted products due to poor age verification methods, it will cause troubles for the seller websites. Parents can sue them and they can lose their reputation in the customer market. The document verification can calculate the age of the user through dob.
Nationality Check
Some websites require users from some specific regions of the world and ban some countries. These sites need to check the nationality of the users onboarding. The document verification software is trained on all documents from about every region. It can easily check the nationality of the user through his documents.
Expiry and Issuance Date
Online automobile services require the valid (not expired) driving licence of the drivers. The software can check the expiry date of the document. Sometimes the documents do not have the expiry date but the laws of that state define the valid time period after the issuance date. The software can determine the expiry date as defined by the government rules.