Identity verification for fintech and lending

A loan or account application is only as good as the identity behind it. Synthetic identities — a mix of real and fabricated information — and borrowed genuine identities are both designed to pass a cursory glance at a form. Identity verification is the step that checks the document and the person against each other, before a manual review queue has to catch what the form didn't.

What identity verification is actually catching

Two different failure modes matter here. A stolen or borrowed identity means a real document, but the wrong person holding it — caught by face match and liveness, which confirm the live applicant matches the document photo and is actually present. A fabricated or altered identity means a document that doesn't hold together — caught by cross-checking the barcode, the printed face and, where relevant, the MRZ against each other, plus document tamper scoring reported as its own signal.

Where this sits in onboarding

The applicant completes verification on their own phone via a hosted link or an embedded flow, as one step in your existing onboarding — typically before funds move or an account is fully activated. Results arrive as a signed webhook with per-check verdicts (document, liveness, anti-spoof, face match), so your underwriting or onboarding logic can act on specific signals rather than one bundled score, and so a reviewer can see exactly what did or didn't check out.

• Document verification: US driver's licenses and state IDs read and cross-checked front and back against the barcode, plus passports read from the machine-readable zone. Coverage spans all 50 states, the District of Columbia, five US territories and US State Department diplomatic IDs, 57 issuing jurisdictions in total.
• Liveness and face match: confirms a live, present person matches the document photo.
• Fraud signals: anti-spoof, deepfake, mask and document tamper checks, each reported on its own, on every application.
• Sanctions screening: watchlist checks against major lists, including OFAC, available as an account-level add-on alongside identity verification.

A note on compliance language

This guide describes what the product checks and how; it does not make your lending program "CIP compliant" or "KYC compliant." A lender's Customer Identification Program under the Bank Secrecy Act and the USA PATRIOT Act, and the AML program built around it, are the lender's own responsibility. ShieldID supplies verification evidence, per-field verdicts and a kept record, that your compliance function can use as one input to that program; it does not determine whether your program satisfies any regulator's requirements.

Getting started

A sandbox key, never billed, lets your team see the full session lifecycle — session creation, applicant flow, webhook payload — before wiring it into a production onboarding pipeline.