What have Veriff been up to in 2021? - A year-end product update

You may notice, it’s been a while.

Yes, as we worked hard on other big projects, our product updates blog fell silent. And we take responsibility for that. But now, we can finally shout all about what we’ve done since early in the year, and shine a light on the incredible work of our awesome development teams.

There’s a lot to get through, so let’s get to it!

Veriff Station

This is your verification dashboard, and source of truth when it comes to knowing the details of customer verifications, and you’ve likely seen and interacted with a few of the big changes we’ve made this year. So what have we done?

UI Updates

We made a big splash about our complete AML Compliance solution earlier in the year, and as part of this we brought checks for both politically exposed persons and global sanctions into the Station interface. This means you can see when a potential customer has been matched with any of the relevant databases and possibly denied or asked to resubmit as a result.

Aside from this bigger change, we also made small tweaks to Veriff Station, including renaming fields to give them a clearer meaning. As examples, ID Code became Personal Number, and Serial Number became Document Number, allowing both terms to be understood more widely.

Decisions to Email

We’ve written a separate blog about this update, so we’ll keep it short here. We gave you the ability to send decisions and session events directly to an email address, adding a level of convenience to the Station experience.

Proof of Address

It’s another update we were proud to announce, as we gave businesses the option to ask for a proof of address document within Veriff’s flow. This allows you to know a crucial additional detail about potential customers, and is actually a requirement for financial institutions in some countries.

As part of introducing this to our flow, it also made its way to Veriff Station, where you can check the uploaded documents as you would with a normal verification.

Technical upgrades

Aside from the improvements you can see, we’re always working on the technical side of all our products, and Station is no different.

We improved our public API, with the media endpoint now sending you the best images from a verification first, sorted by best image to worst. We also made a security improvement to our API and webhooks, with HMAC-X-Signature now a default in both. This allows for more secure communication between Veriff and our clients.

Verifications

A crucial element of Veriff’s product is the level of automation, allowing your customers to get quick verification decisions without human involvement. 

Improving document detection

It may sound like a basic update, but we work tirelessly to improve both our document database (it’s up to over 10,000, ICYMI), and our ability to detect fake and tampered documents automatically. Obviously we can’t share the secret sauce here, but we’ve made further steps this year in catching the bad guys when they try to sign up with dodgy documents.

Driving Licenses

We’ve spoken about it previously, but we’ll mention it again — we can now extract the category of driving license where it’s relevant and necessary. This means mobility companies will know which vehicles their users are able to drive which can be helpful if they rent out different categories of vehicles or if they’re considering it.

Internal updates

This is where we pull the curtain back just a little, as there are a few internal updates we can mention that will improve Veriff’s products for our clients and their customers. The first is session prioritisation for manual verification specialists. The feature helps to make sure that we can provide the fastest and most quality service to our clients by picking the best person from the company who can do the manual verification.

Finally, we’ve also been able to increase the data we can work with to improve our machine learning models, thanks to the cooperation of clients. This doesn’t affect the safety of the data at any time, but allows our automation to improve and become more accurate and efficient.

New documents

Lastly, we always round up the new documents we’ve added - so since our last product update, here’s a list of all the documents we’ve added to our rapidly expanding database (and when we added them):

• Denmark - ID Card, known as ‘Legimationskort’ (June)
• Lebanon - Residence permit & Work permit (June)
• Togo - Residence permit, known as ‘Carte De Sejour’ (June)
• Zambia - National Registration Card (June)
• Equatorial Guinea - Personal Identity Document (July)
• Sri Lanka - National Identity Card (July)
• Belarus - Identity Card (October)
• Palau - Vehicle Operator License (November)
• Solomon Islands - Driving License (November)
• Turks & Caicos - Driving License (January 2022)

AND THAT’S IT. Phew. That rounds up a whole lot of updates that happened throughout 2021. We’re not slowing down either, 2022 will bring more exciting improvements and evolution for Veriff, continuing in our ultimate goal to build the infrastructure for trust online, and our daily goal of providing the absolute best identity verification available anywhere.

See you in 2022 and Happy Veriffing!