Document validation and verification seem like an ideal solution. It’s the simplest way to quickly onboard the largest number of customers. It can be used by both the large and small companies across industries, including Financial Institutions, E-tailers, Marketplaces, Healthcare, etc.
However, companies using document validation and verification will tell you that the reality is never quite what they expect. Often, the service fails to meet their expectations. Why is that? It turns out the problem of document validation and verification is immensely challenging.
Many think that document validation and verification is taking a picture of a document and checking it with a government database. In reality, it’s much more complex.
Ideally the information in a document could be referenced against a government database that would verify it. However, no state provides this service as a commercially viable solution. This means it is up to the provider to determine if it is legitimate and if it has been tampered with. This sometimes happens by cross-referencing the information in the ID with publicly available information, but the false-positive rate of these checks are very high as people move, change names, etc.
Using the US as an example, there are 50 states + 16 U.S. Territories. Each state updates their driver’s licenses every few years. Coupled with Passports, Military IDs, National IDs and Visas and you need to be able to validate hundreds of different document types. A Document Validation and Verification service needs to identify the document type and cross-reference it with a database, looking for key things it should have including
Two of these ways are:
OCR
Barcode Capture/Transaction
There’s more data there than most people realize and this data must be analyzed.
Often your system may need to compare information (e.g. what’s on the front of the document may be compared to what is in the barcode), and you’ll need to make sure the information is in the correct place. Typically, OCR Software will simply extract the data encoded in the barcode and present it to the business.
As an example, it may read my FAKE ID and come back with the OCR saying “Joe Sample; 123 Jackal Road, TX, 5 ft 6 in”
However, because this is a fake ID, what matters most is not the extraction of the data, but showing the business that it is real or fake.
So as an example, Intellicheck’s software would read the barcode and alert the business that it is fake, while also extracting the relevant data. Why? Because Intellicheck is the only provider that works with the AAMVA and the license providers to ensure that they know the correct format and security marks for each ID type. This helps ensure that you know that you know whether you can trust it. .
There’s an expectation that the document review process will be near-instantaneous.
Because OCR-based processes are essentially computer driven visual inspections, there are many required steps from comparing the ID to a template, to individually checking the fields against third party databases, to machine learning-based processes to make sense of all the data reviewed. If you add on the uploading of large photos and the possibility for manual review, these processes can range from a few minutes to a few hours or even stretch into the next day.
Barcode based processes are, by nature, much faster because there are fewer steps and no large files to upload.
Companies that sell high-ticket items or have higher-risks from a bad customer are much less accepting of false negatives. On the other hand, companies that onboard a high-volume of consumers, especially newer companies may not have the staff or workflow to deal with false positives.
This is when the document has gone through and cannot determine if it is authentic. In this case, the challenge here is that unless it’s a blatant forgery you’re relying on manual review which is an extremely imprecise process.
Why is it imprecise? We’re now back to relying on humans to make the decision on whether or not the document and person is real or fake. That’s the whole reason you sought out a solution, in the first place — to remove the human element and human error.
What priorities are your company focused on and why? Here’s a list of items to think about: