It’s a little later than hoped, but we’re excited to share our verification flow updates made back in October. We maintained our aim of continuing to improve the end user experience, helping users on their road to an approved verification.

New UI customization options in our Android SDK

We’ve listened to our clients and expanded our UI customization options. Right now we’re rolling it out on Android, with iOS on the way in the coming months.

With the update you’re now able to make the following customizations:

Download the full customization guide to find out more.

Fixed user interface display issues in Vietnamese on our web flow

UI tweaks to barcode scanning flow on web

We reduced our iOS SDK size by around 10MB - around two-thirds of its total size! Our new iOS SDK is just about 5MB. 

Reduced bandwidth for Web video recordings

During October, we reduced the bandwidth allocation in our web flow for background video recording to 500kbps. This improved conversion in an AB test by 2% in comparison to the previous bandwidth limit. Not so surprisingly, the improvement was most visible in locations with lower internet speeds.

Along with everything mentioned above, we dedicated time to improving the overall quality of our verification flow with updates to both automated and manual testing, plus fixes to a series of bugs.

And that’s all for our October updates. Our November updates will be following hot on their heels, so make sure to keep an eye out on Monday to see what we’ve been up to which held up this blog so much! Happy Veriffing!

It’s a little later than hoped, but we’re excited to share our verification flow updates made back in October!

Want to know what we got up to in October with our verification flow? Of course you do!

What’s New - October 2020: Veriff’s Verification Flow

We can split our new developments on the verification flow during Q3 to two separate categories:

first - improving the end user experience and conversion rates 

second - focusing on improving our collected document images quality and widening our inputs to increase our ability to automate verifications

We’ve also made a wealth of technical improvements.

We have overhauled our user interface on the Web. With the overhaul we’ve made the flow much shorter and easier to complete for users getting verified.

Veriff's Identity Document Verification Flow - NFC for UK Passport

Handover from desktop/laptop to a mobile device

Nearly all laptops and desktop computers have a common problem in terms of document verifications -  their webcam quality is too low for identity verification. These are meant for video calling and they work perfectly for it, but we at Veriff need to extract  document data from these images that verify that the document is authentic. This is a hard task and often meant that users needed to capture the images multiple times to be able to get a good enough set of the images.

So, we found a perfect solution. We built a feature which hands users conveniently over to their mobile device via scanning a QR code or via sending an SMS to themselves.

To make the feature very user-friendly we connected the session on their mobile to the one on their computer, which means after the user has snapped the images on mobile we can ask them to go back to the computer and continue back to the original website, all the time keeping their verification session intact. 

With this feature we’re able to get much higher quality images and other data from end users’ devices, while at the same time improving the end user experience, as now far more people are able to get themselves verified on the first try.

Veriff introduced Assisted Image Capture earlier this year, which gives live feedback to users when their pictures aren’t perfect quality. We’ve now taken this to the next level, by giving users visual feedback on what’s wrong with their photo, together with a guide on how to take the perfect shot. This feature is available right now on our web flow and our Android SDK. 

We’ve added the ability to remove the introduction screen from your verification flow in case you want to inform the user yourself about the verification and the legal policies around it.

We’ve removed the last screen of our verification flow from Android SDK and our web flow. Now we send the person straight from the waiting screen back to where they were previously.

We’ve finalized the move of the selfie step to after capturing the document pictures. Last to get the update was our iOS SDK. 

We’ve released the next iteration of our biometric passport scanning feature to our Android SDK. The new feature enables us to capture all the relevant passport data which is also signed by a governmental digital signature. This makes the data incredibly trustworth as it’s pretty darn hard to manipulate government digital signatures without breaking the error correction algorithms.

The digital data we collect consists of the document photo and all passport details. This is a perfect verification method for applications which need a very high level of security, and in general for all regular sessions it enables us to automate the decision making process for these documents.

We’re planning to widen this type of support from passports to other documents with NFC chips and to bring this level of biometric passport support also to our iOS SDK.

In the Veriff web flow you now have the ability to scan the barcode on your document (if it has one). This allows us to easily get all the document data in a digital format without any mistakes.

We have swapped out our background video recording technology in our verification sessions. With the technology change the background videos now have a consistent stable quality, as we no longer rely on a live video stream. In addition to this, we’ve reduced the video file sizes. We now record about 1MB of data for 1 minute of video with the ability to optimize it even further coming soon. This change is extremely important for users who are doing their identity verification in locations where internet connectivity is not the fastest.

Size matters. And that’s we’ve been working on reducing the size of our SDK’s. We managed to reduce our Android SDK size by 11MB to only 5MB. In the near future we’ll also roll out a similar size reduction to our iOS SDK.

New opportunity for host app to set Veriff UI language

We’ve added the opportunity to our SDKs to set the Veriff UI language, to ensure that it matches the language the host app has. Veriff now supports 36 localizations, with the latest language added being Catalan. 

Mobile phone camera handling updates for web

Most new phones have two, three, or even four(!) rear cameras nowadays. Unfortunately web APIs haven’t yet fully caught up with the number of cameras on the devices. We’ve been working on improving our camera detection algorithms to make sure that we always use the camera which has the best quality.

We’ve been working to make sure that Veriff works perfectly with the newest operating systems and development tools. We wrote all about it here.

Finally, we’ve added support for Swift Package Manager to our iOS SDK. Now you’re able to integrate Veriff easily no matter what version of xCode you are using.

Our incredible product team has been hard at work during the summer to improve Veriff, and what we offer to all of our partners within our verification flow - and here are all the updates we've made.

What’s New - August & September 2020: Veriff’s Verification Flow

We’re moving steadily towards the winter months in Estonia - the air is getting crisper, the leaves are succumbing to gravity, and the smell of gingerbread is starting to waft through the air. Our development teams have been working hard as always, and we’re here to highlight some of the most important changes for you, our clients.

Veriff this week announced the launch of a crucial new product feature for our mobility partners - driver’s licence category extraction. This means Veriff now automatically records the type of vehicle that a user is allowed to drive, a pivotal piece of information for all car-sharing or car-rental companies.

In other automation news, we’ve also made a number of overall service improvements, including adding both document and personal ID number validation, so the numbers on a document are validated against the standard length or conditions. As an example, if we know a standard document number consists of five letters and then six numbers - we’ll check this automatically meaning an incorrect number can’t be submitted.

This will improve overall trust in verifications and verification decisions.

Move faster or look closer in Veriff Station

Your daily verification dashboard, Veriff Station, has seen a lot of updates in the last month, so let’s highlight some of the most important ones.

The first major one is in the detailed view in Veriff station, where we’ve added the ability to speed up verification recording videos. You can now check a verification at up to 5x the regular speed if necessary. And at the opposite end of the scale, if you need to go into deeper detail, you can now rotate and zoom into user images to get a closer look at their selfie or ID.

Elsewhere in Station, we’ve improved integration between Veriff and your own internal systems. You can now link directly to the media section in the detailed session view using the #media anchor, which saves on scrolling time and means you can access all-important details faster.

Finally, if you do integrate Veriff with your own internal back-office, you can now create direct links from the Veriff Station dashboard to your back-office to make things much easier. And for more security-conscious clients, you can also now limit access to your Veriff Station by IP address. This provides an extra layer of security on top of the standard email & password login.

That’s everything for this updates blog, but we’ll once again have a separate blog covering all the improvements made in our verification flow coming very soon so keep an eye out for that! And as always, if you’d like to know more about what we’re up to, keep an eye on our social media - Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram, or get in touch. Happy Veriffing!

It’s time to shine a light on what our awesome product teams have been up to in the past month - including a major new feature launch and some exciting improvements to Veriff Station.

What's New - October 2020: Veriff Product Update

It’s been an ever-changing couple of months for the Veriff team, as we moved back to fully remote working in early September as a precautionary measure. Our office sits quietly, but like earlier in the year, we do not. Here’s what our product teams have been up to over the last 6-7 weeks.

Your daily dashboard, Veriff Station, has seen some exciting improvements, particularly the new image display for each verification session. We’ve now added scrolling controls and zoom, along with all images collected within our EU-based verification flow. This makes it easier to review sessions and see reasons why a verification might have been declined or sent for resubmission.

You’ll also see an update to images if you get your data via an API, as we improved our /media endpoint, so it now supports a large amount of images being sent.

If you’ve got NFC as part of your verification flow you’ll also now see the portrait image which is imported via NFC along with all the relevant verification session media. And if you’re interested in NFC, you can learn more about it in our dedicated blog post here.

We’ve also made some updates to risk labels (which we’ve mentioned here before), improving performance and only displaying relevant risk labels, which should make things more straightforward.

The final Station update is to our transactional emails - we’ve heard the feedback you’ve sent, and have worked at making our emails simpler to add clarity. Hopefully any confusion you’ve had in the past will be avoided from now on.

There is so much news about the updates to our verification flow over the past 2 months that we’ve written an entire separate article about it! Give it a read now.

We also wrote a separate blog article about our support for Apple iOS 14, so definitely check in with that as well.

A new document for our friends Down Under

To wrap up our product updates - we couldn’t fail to mention the newest identity document we’ve added support for, the Australian Residence Permit, issued by Department of Home Affairs.

If you’ve never considered moving to the vast, beautiful country of Australia, you may not know how challenging it is to get your hands on this document - the application process can take some serious time - so it’s an immensely valuable piece of paperwork. And now it’s a little better, as it’s accepted by Veriff!

A little later than planned, here’s two months worth of exciting updates from all across Veriff!

What’s New - August & September 2020: Veriff Product Update

What’s New - October 2020: Veriff’s Verification Flow

User experience updates

New UI customization options in our Android SDK

Smaller (but still important!) changes

Technical improvements

Reduced iOS SDK size

Reduced bandwidth for Web video recordings

Bug fixes and tech improvements

Raul Liive

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What’s New - August & September 2020: Veriff’s Verification Flow

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What’s New - August & September 2020: Veriff Product Update