Ashley Nelson
If you own a business in 2022, there is a lot to consider. Last year we saw an incredible increase in digitalization, mainly due to the global pandemic. This meant industries that had perhaps been resistant to do business online, suddenly had no choice. And this in turn meant massive growth for online identity verification.
As a business owner, you need to offer customers an online option, but you also need to be certain that your customers are who they claim to be. This trust between you and your clients is what will help your online business flourish and grow in scale. But to know your customers, you need to verify them. So, how do you choose a verification platform to build trust, and why does it even matter?
In this article, we'll try to explain why online identity verification is essential for our digital lives, what are the steps to verify an identity, deep-dive into both Veriff and Onfido's products, and compare the services they offer to their customers.
Solving the online problem by providing identity verification solutions
The digital world is full of new services that people are signing up for daily to improve their lives. Social interactions are taking place behind a screen, and most of the work is getting done online. We need to trust the services we use every day, and that's why online identity verification is crucial. Businesses face the threat of identity theft every second. There is only one solution here - using identity verification software to prevent such misunderstanding situations.
How to verify an identity
When customers need to get verified, they go through a verification flow. There are a couple of steps to consider to get to know your customer, but generally you'll follow this structure:
- Your customer selects their ID document type from four main options - Passport, Driver's License, ID card, or Residence Permit
- They take a readable picture of their document (and upload it to the system)
- Finally they take a selfie to show a face match with their document and submit the image
- They get instant feedback after submitting their images and if they're approved they can move on with your service.
What identity verification services do they offer you?
Veriff and Onfido both cover the most crucial parts of an identity verification service — they offer compliance with ‘Know Your Customer' (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations and extensive fraud prevention services. Regulatory compliance is a major factor in a lot of businesses searching for an identity verification service, so any good company needs to cover these bases from day one.
Veriff currently has five core products —Identity Verification,Assisted Image Capture, Proof of Address, AML Screening, and Biometric Authentication. Veriff's Identity Verification Platform is an end-to-end verification service with a wide range of customizable choices. Its verification flow gathers user data for analysis during the verification session. Clients can configure their decision engine to fit their precise needs, factoring in necessary speed of use and fraud prevention. Veriff knows that a one-size-fits-all solution does not work in this industry. So the verification platform allows you to enable the checks you need. At the same time, clients can monitor results in real-time, manage multiple integrations, and automate information flow in one place.
Veriff's fraud prevention in particular is something we like to shine a light on, as our ability to crosslink verification data enables us to stop fraudsters in a number of ways that other providers don't. When a verification happens, we don't treat it as a blank slate - our automated decision engine looks at previous data points, along with what's happening live during the verification to help make an educated decision on whether to approve or reject the user. This is crucial in stopping repeat offenders.
Keeping customers secure, and building a trusting relationship with them is crucial for businesses to grow, so while AML & KYC compliance are both key, speed also needs to be factored in. This means speed of verification decisions, as well as the overall verification flow. It should never take too long to get verified if you're an honest customer.
This is where our automation plays another key role, as our highly-automated decision engine delivers verification decisions within 6 seconds (on average), and our document checks are now 98% automated, making verifications feel frictionless for users.
So what is Onfido known for? We can only use the information they share publicly, but they speak highly of their document verification, biometric verification and authentication. They point to their ability to catch the most common types of document fraud, as well as offering a biometric video option to help match a user to their ID. Finally their biometric authentication offers the same benefits as Veriff's Biometric Authenticaion — identifying a previously verified user using only their face and the ID document you already have on record.
What products can they provide you with?
Currently, Veriff offers three products - Identity Verification, Assisted Image Capture, and Face Match. Veriff's Identity Verification Platform is an end-to-end verification service, which has a wide range of customizable choices. Its verification flow gathers user data for analysis during the verification session. Clients can configure their decision engine to fit their precise needs, factoring in necessary speed of use and fraud prevention. Veriff knows that a one-size-fits-all solution does not work in this industry. Our verification platform allows you to enable the checks you need. At the same time, you can monitor results in real-time, manage multiple integrations, and automate the flow of information in one place.
Assisted Image Capture helps your customers get verified. It is an active photo assistant, which is assessing verification in real-time and guides users when taking every photo. It displays a message if there is a problem when taking a picture and guarantees sharp, well-lit images, which leads to an average first-time pass rate of 95%.
Finally, Face Match, which we mentioned above, was launched recently, and offers you an easy way to reverify your users. This can be triggered if they're making a large financial transaction, signing in using an unknown device, or taking any action that needs an additional level of security. Face Match allows you to compare a selfie of the user to their ID on file and gives a reverification decision in 1 second.
Onfido products offer a smart approach to customer identity. During the verification flow, customers take pictures of their document. Onfido also helps your users by letting them know if there is too much blur or too much glare on the picture when doing document verification. They offer the option to see the results in real-time. Onfido's product also provides a third type of result in their verification flow — Cautions. It allows their clients not to turn away potentially good customers at a huge revenue cost. This is why lots of companies trust Onfido background checks.
Their website also lists a large number of use cases they can offer to their customers. Companies and organizations can use their services for KYC, user onboarding, identity verification, or fraud detection. They offer a Partner Program that provides you with the necessary tools, guidance and support to deliver their service. They also offer four kinds of partnerships depending on their customer needs. Partners can be Technology Resellers, Referral Partners, Commercial Resellers, or System Integrators.
How long does verification take?
As mentioned previously, the check automation rate for Veriff is 98%, and on average it takes 6 seconds to get a decision for a session. Veriff also sends webhook notifications immediately after each step is completed. This way, the flow is smooth, and the verification is done in the fastest time possible.
How long does Onfido take to verify a user? According to their website, it takes up to 30 seconds for Onfido to verify a session and they advertise a high automation rate. Generally, up to 80% of the sessions are automated.
Is verification safe and secure?
Both of these verification service providers have gained trust from global companies and market leaders within their respective industries. Building trust in the digital world is in Veriff's DNA. Considering the customers they have all over the world, we can safely assume that these companies provide safe and secure verification services.
Veriff is compliant with CCPA, GDPR, SOC2 Type II, and WCAG Accessibility Guidelines. Onfido is also SOC2 Type II compliant and ISO 27001 certified. Their report is available for customers. They are committed to protecting the privacy and security of identities they verify on a daily basis.
Let's talk Enterprise
When it comes to the Enterprise Plan, Veriff understands that every company has different KYC compliance and fraud prevention needs. The pricing is tailored, and not fixed, so it is negotiable with Veriff depending on your needs. To sign up for an Enterprise, companies need to contact Veriff's team, so they can work together to find the best possible verification options for the company's needs. Enterprise tends to appeal to companies who need over 1,000 verification sessions per month, but this is negotiable and if you feel your business needs the configurability you can still reach out to Veriff to talk to them.
Enterprise offers a dedicated account manager, who'll work with you throughout your time as a Veriff client to cater your verification to your needs as they evolve. We'll look to scale with you and make sure you can focus on your business and identity verification will be taken care of.
Onfido requires all potential customers to get in touch with them to join their platform. There's no information on the website about Onfido pricing. They have a partner program where they offer their verification services to their clients. Onfido does not provide a free trial, but you can request a product demo to see how it works.
A look at the reviews
If we look at the reviews from Veriff's customers, we can see that their performance has improved significantly after using Veriff services. For example, the CIO of Uphold states that they use this service for onboarding their clients and the quality of Verifications has improved a lot: “Before choosing Veriff, and as a part of proof of value, we did an A/B test — half of our customers were going through this competitor and half through Veriff. Afterwards when we ran an analysis to compare how many false-positives we were getting between the two solutions and Veriff was so much better than the competitor.”
According to the General Manager of Blockchain, Xen Baynham-Herd, “Veriff's technology is world-class, and they've been an even better partner.”
Onfido also receives positive reviews from its customers. For example, Djoeri Timessen, the Chief Product Officer of Bunq, says “the results are pretty staggering. We're able to onboard 5x the volume of users. 80% of users are approved automatically and the rest approved within minutes.”
So which is the best identity verification service?
To sum it all up, we can clearly see that both companies claim to provide an amazing verification service to their customers. But as Veriff is more transparent with their potential users in terms of showing the price list of various plans, offering a free trial, and having an individual approach to partners, we believe that Veriff provides the best verification service worldwide. We'd always encourage potential clients of either company to test out both - and draw your own conclusions.
Beyond that, Veriff also currently supports over 12,000 documents, the most of any IDV provider on the market. Veriff supports over 45 languages & dialects, while Onfido currently supports 7 languages & dialects.
Here at Veriff, we believe that we make the digital world safer with the tools we are building.
