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Learn moreSolving ID Poverty With Remote Identity Verification in the UK
Vouchsafe is a digital ID‑native trust platform that helps financial services onboard more customers by verifying identity with and without photo ID. A significant share of their applicants can’t complete a strict “ID or fail” flow because they don’t have a recognized government photo ID, which Vouchsafe calls ID poverty. The company points to estimates of around one billion people worldwide without photo ID, including 11 million in the UK.
Vouchsafe starts by asking a user if they want to share information from a recognized digital ID or wallet, which is a fast and efficient path when available. If the user has no digital ID or photo ID, Vouchsafe offers inclusive fallback routes such as vouching. A trusted referee with the right documents verifies the person and goes through KYC themselves, accounting for around one fifth of verifications. Many also have lower digital literacy and often require assistance during the scanning step. Early on, Vouchsafe’s MVP used AWS Rekognition for biometric features. Results were acceptable, but as the product matured, the team hit a familiar scaling problem: improving face matching, capture quality, and resilience to device diversity required recurring engineering effort. Vouchsafe wanted a managed biometric solution that could keep pace with fraud patterns and device variability without constant in-house tuning.
and alternative evidence
without enterprise-level cost
at the document capture stage
Vouchsafe integrated Innovatrics identity verification technology to handle the autocapture of photo IDs and the verification of their users with liveness detection. The biometric checks now run as part of a single flow, so documents are captured in a consistent way and faces are verified without extra steps for the user.
The Vouchsafe team wanted a white-label setup, as many end users are not comfortable being redirected between different provider screens. Innovatrics components run behind Vouchsafe’s own interface, which keeps the journey familiar. Vouchsafe brought a clear list of needs and journey gaps, and worked with Innovatrics specialists to design the integration and migration.
with Vouchsafe’s interface
for end users
from the old build with no downtime
Vouchsafe now completes more than 99% of document scans without incident, with remaining issues tied mainly to very old or low-quality documents. Support requests around capture have dropped, and the move from the previous AWS-based setup to Innovatrics was completed smoothly with no downtime for clients.
Clients keep full control of their branding while users stay in a single, consistent interface, which helps those with lower digital skills complete the journey. Vouchsafe continues to support biometric vouching for people without ID and has added support for digital identity wallets worldwide, including in the EU, so mid-market institutions can accept these credentials as part of standard KYC.
successful document scans
and new schemes
with lower digital skills
Vouchsafe moved from proof of concept with no paying clients to 35 paying customers, more than 1,300 completed onboardings, and substantial recurring revenue. Many of these customers are UK credit unions and NGOs that lend to people who sit outside mainstream lending. For Innovatrics Biometric Ventures, this is a concrete example of the model in action.
Vouchsafe is working on support for EU digital identity wallets and aims to act as a bridge between these wallets and UK firms that need to verify customers from many member states with different back-end rules. Innovatrics provides the biometric building blocks that let the platform handle both document-based and wallet-based flows within one architecture.
Vouchsafe’s use of Innovatrics biometrics gives mid‑market organizations a way to treat remote identity verification as a standard part of their operation rather than a special project. Document capture, face matching, liveness, and vouching all fit into one flow that can run on typical consumer devices.
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