Customer onboarding
Vouchsafe is ideal for onboarding customers in regulated environments.
The platform is certified to the UK DVS trust framework, making it a great fit for fintechs and other firms that have to follow the Money Laundering Regulations.
Because Vouchsafe emphasises digital evidence and official data rather than photo ID and document scanning, it is also:
- safer for everyone, because you are less likely to onboard a fake or stolen identity
- easier for everyone, because customers can do everything digitally, and get instant decision
Consider how common impersonation or accepting a stolen identity is likely to be for your product or service, and how damaging it would be if you accepted one.
This single choice most influences how you design the onboarding flow.
1. Collect information from the customer
Collect the customer’s name, date of birth, contact details and address with a form in the usual way.
Once you have everything you need, call the Risk API with it.
The more data you provide, the lower the likelihood of false positives or negatives.
Vouchsafe will return an instant risk score that represents the likelihood of fraud.
Enrichments
The core Risk API is not enough to allow a compliant onboarding by itself, but with the following enrichments it can meet 2+2 eKYC rules set by the JMLSG and FCA:
- Credit bureau
- Anti-money laundering
If all these checks pass, you may be able to safely onboard the customer based on the Risk API result alone.
Address validation
The Risk API will return better matches if the address has been properly validated and structured.
You can use our SearchPostcode endpoint to power an address search feature.
There are also specialist providers that offer advanced features, like:
- Ideal Postcodes
- Postcoder
- PAF solution providers
2. Perform step-up verification
Based on the outcome of step 1, you may choose to send a customer for step-up verification.
If you have a stricter risk appetite or your service is more prone to impersonation, you may choose to have all customers properly prove their identity and address in this way.
First, publish an appropriate verification flow for your use case and regulatory context using one of our templates.
Don’t forget to define onward URLs for the customer to return to once done.
Then, based on the result of step 1, call the RequestVerification endpoint to get a unique verification URL to send the customer to.
Challenged customers will prove who they are, usually with digital evidence and official data.
Pass as much information about the customer as you can, to make sure that you are verifying the right person.
Vouchsafe makes sure the name, date of birth and address on evidence match what you expect.
3. Handle the result
Once the customer completes verification, they will be returned to the URL you specify.
At this point, you should either call out to the GetVerification endpoint, or listen for a webhook event, and update your database with the outcome of the verification.
If the result is good, you can lift the customer’s account limits.
4. Listen for alerts
Vouchsafe works in real-time, and proactively monitors customer details for you using the Alerts.
If another business makes a fraud report, or an anomaly is spotted that might indicate a stolen or made-up identity, you find out instantly.
By default you’ll get an email, but you can automate it by listening for the relevant webhook events.
If you get an alert webhook, you will normally want to either:
- trigger step-up verification
- block the user’s account from taking some actions until your team can investigate