Document Verification Process: Traditional Vs Digital approach

Organisations from all sectors today are competing over the same pool of employees, customers, partners, and merchants. At such times, to have a competitive advantage over other businesses, you need a quick and frictionless document verification process.  

But, the traditional document verification process tells a different story: 

1. Requires physical presence of both the parties (verifier and the candidate) 
2. Involves physical paperwork, manual effort, and is susceptible to errors
3. Is a time consuming and bumpy experience for both the parties (verifier and the candidate) 

Phew! Clearly, there’s a need for a better solution.

After all, your organisation cannot afford loosing a business opportunity over an outdated process. 

Just what you need: A Digital Document Verification Process and Journey

Machine learning has paved way for a completely digitised document verification process and journey. These ML-based APIs for BGV have enabled online document verification. Making document verification efficient enough to meet your organisation’s requirements. The digital process ensures safety, minimal TAT and no manual effort. On top of it, the journey ensures a frictionless experience for the candidate and the verifier. 

Let’s look at how IDfy’s digital document verification solutions solves your problems. 

P.S.: Let’s consider a candidate as an individual/entity who’s being verified

1.Digital document collection and verification 

Firstly, your candidates don’t need to visit you in person. They can click pictures of their documents and send it your way for verification. 

Secondly, APIs like ‘document alignment’ and ‘document validation’ will ensure you get the correct documents in one go. While the former API ensures readable and correctly aligned documents, the latter makes sure you receive the correct document type. For eg., your candidates cannot submit a PAN card if you have asked them for an Aadhaar card.

Thirdly, you won’t need to manually type and save candidate details. As, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) APIs will read the data on documents, extract it, and fill it in appropriate columns for your future reference. Simply put, this will allow you to automate your data entry.

Here’s the big one- you can now verify your candidate’s documents instantly. Using digital verification APIs, you can get instant verification results for document checks. These include: Aadhaar, PAN, driving license, passport, voter id, vaccine certificate, bank cheque, Udyog aadhaar, and GST certificate. Consequently, your BGV vendor can also verify professional certificates online. 

Wondering what APIs in background verification are? Click here

2. Advance fraud detection

Digitally verified documents are extremely reliable. What a naked eye might not catch, will definitely be detected by self-learning machine models used in digital document verification. To sum up, it is hyper-accurate and spots even the slightest of anomaly in the document.

Likewise, digital document verification is also helping us detect advance fraud. 

User authentication APIs are helping prevent impersonation fraud. One of the APIs compares the candidate’s photos from two sources – documents and a real-time picture. It then gives you a match score of these images. So you can steer clear of impersonation fraud.

These APIs can also help you verify signatures.

3. A frictionless candidate and verifier experience 

Users today expect a friction-less verification process. In fact, 84% of consumers say that a good onboarding experience is as important as a company’s products and services. Businesses must ensure a modern approach to document verification to meet user expectations. 

At IDfy, we have carefully curated a background verification journey that treats your candidates the best. 

Here’s what it delivers:

1. A frictionless login 
2. A user-friendly UI
3. Can save the filled information on the candidate’s command to avoid form refills
4. Real-time and analytical dashboard to track the progress

Frequently asked questions in document verification process

What is a document verification process

Document verification is the process of verifying the authenticity of ID and other official documents. For eg., Aadhaar card, PAN, driving license, passport, bank statements, professional certificates, etc. 

There are two stages to it. Firstly, your BGV vendor scans the documents for security features like holograms, watermarks, stamps, fonts, and more. 

Secondly, the details on the documents (like name, date of birth, address, photo, etc.) are checked against third party data sources. These sources can be government/authority databases. 

Alternatively, in the second stage the PII data is matched with the data extracted from the machine readable zone (MRZ).

Who should conduct document verification

A stringent document verification process as a part of onboarding is necessary for any entity that wants to start business with an individual/entity. There are three types of the same:

1. Employee onboarding (For organisations hiring part/full-time employees)
2. Client/customer onboarding (For banks, financial institutions, etc.)
3. Merchant/partner onboarding (For E-commerce, delivery companies, etc.)

What documents are needed for document verification?

This depends on who your organisation wants to verify- is it a prospective employee, customer, a partner, or a vendor? Meanwhile, these may include Aadhaar, PAN, driving license, passport, voter id, vaccine certificate, bank cheque, Udyog aadhaar, and GST certificate can be verified instantly.

How long does it take for document verification?

This depends on the type of process your organization uses to verify documents. For instance, the traditional document verification process may take anywhere from 10-12 weeks. But, a digital document verification process yields instant verification results after the documents are submitted. So, documents such as Aadhaar, PAN, driving license, passport, voter id, vaccine certificate, cheque, Udyog aadhaar, and GST certificate can be verified instantly.