What Is an ID Checker?

Verifying the identity of your customers is of paramount importance for any secure transaction, especially if your business needs to remain compliant with financial regulations. The internet is a wonderful place, but you can never be 100% sure who you’re dealing with when completing transactions online. The ability to identify your customers is an essential part of AML, Know Your Customer and Customer Due Diligence.

By failing to identify your clients, you open up your business to a greater risk of identity fraud and accusations of non-compliance. Preventing fraud and ensuring compliance is extremely important for businesses of all sizes, especially those managing high-risk transactions and deals. By verifying the identity of your signers, you can ensure your business is protected from financial costs and reputational damage.

This is where an ID Checker steps in. With the ability to digitalise your ID verification, an online ID Checker can instantly verify the identity of your clients for a quicker and more efficient way to ensure full compliance with Customer Due Diligence and Know Your Customer.

What is customer due diligence?

Customer due diligence is a law that requires all businesses to verify the identity of their customers and the source of their funds. In practical terms, this means taking appropriate steps to verify the identity of your customers to ensure they are who they say they are. To do this, businesses must obtain:

• • • Name
    • Photograph on an official document which confirms their identity
    • Residential address and date of birth

According to the government’s website Gov.co.uk, you must adhere to customer due diligence:

• • • ✔When you establish a business relationship with a customer
      ✔When you suspect money laundering or terrorist financing✔when you doubt any customer information previously obtained
      ✔When circumstances change for existing customers
      ✔If you are not a high value dealer but carry out an occasional transaction worth £15,000 or more
      ✔As a high value dealer, when you: make a payment to a supplier worth £10,000 or more or carry out an occasional transaction worth £10,000 or more.

What is Know Your Customer?

Know Your Customer refers to the initial checks carried out at the beginning of a client relationship to verify their identity. Like CDD (Customer Due Diligence), it’s part of the wider anti-money laundering processes, designed to verify the identity of your customer and the source of their funds.

The minimum information companies and financial institutions must collect from customers is:

• • • Name
    • Date of birth
    • Address
    • Identification number

What’s the difference between Customer Due Diligence and Know Your Customer? 

While both CDD and KYC are both part of anti-money laundering regulation, KYC is carried out with new clients in the first stage of a business relationship, as part of a wider vetting process for potential customers. CDD, however, is an ongoing verification process, designed to weed out suspicious activity, money laundering and proceeds of crime. Both are extremely important for financial companies and other businesses dealing with high value transactions. Breaching AML regulations could have severe financial consequences for your business and could even result in prosecution in extreme cases. It’s therefore extremely important to ensure you remain compliant, and correctly verify the identity of your customers before engaging in business with them.

Embedding ID Verification Into Your Document Management

Embedding ID verification into your document management process is an easy way to ensure your business is adhering to AML legislation, Know Your Customer guidance and Customer Due Diligence. With our e-signature platform, you can easily integrate our E-Sign iD Checker into your e-signature process, ensuring you can verify the identity of your signers and collect their signature in one efficient transaction.

How does E-Sign’s iD Checker Work?

When you send a document for signing, you can choose to integrate ID verification as part of the e-signature process.  When you go to sign and send your documents, you can simply click on the button underneath the sending options to embed our advanced iD Checker. This will invite your signers to e-sign your document as normal but will first direct them to the ID validation page. Here, they will be asked to provide key information that can be used to verify their identity, such as their name, birthday, address and either passport or driving licence details. Our iD Checker will then screen these details against a global database to confirm that they are who they say they are, accessing a wealth of information to verify and comply with the following:

• Age Verification
• Identity Verification
• Anti-Money Laundering (AML)
• Know Your Customer (KYC)
• PEPs and Sanctions

Once their identity has been fully verified, your signer will then be re-directed to your document to e-sign and return to you, so you can collect signatures and complete transactions while successfully verifying the identity of your customers and remaining compliant.

E-Sign is a leading provider of digital document management solutions, supplying professional Electronic Signatures, Form Builder, Web Form, ID Checker and Personalised Email solutions to businesses across the UK.

To find out more about our E-Sign solutions and how they could transform your business, get in touch with us today.