Stripe goes beyond its payment products, launches Stripe Identity, an ID verification system for online businesses as a means of reducing fraud, preventing account takeovers and stopping bad actors.
Stripe Identity is designed to help online firms comply with age requirements and KYC laws, as well as to reduce fraud and prevent account takeovers. Companies can use the self-serve tool to verify user identities, with Stripe managing the customer data in an encrypted format, using computer vision and machine learning to “read” and match up government IDs with live selfies.
It can be integrated via either a low-code or a no-code option. The low-code integration is hosted by Stripe lets businesses get up and running with verification in minutes, Stripe said. The no-code option lets fraud and risk teams generate verification links to assess suspicious transactions or high-risk users.
As part of the identity verification process, users take a photo of their government ID and a live selfie, which Stripe’s machine learning then matches to the ID. Businesses can also request that users provide additional information that can be checked against third-party records.
The information collected is encrypted and sent directly to Stripe, which means no sensitive, personal information is ever stored on a business’s own servers. The entire verification process for an individual user can be completed in 15 seconds, Stripe said.
The service is launching in beta starting today in 30 countries, the company said, but in the meantime, it’s already quietly been in use by select partners. They include Discord – as part of its ID verification feature; Peerspace – which runs ID verification when onboarding users and merchants; Shippo – when it identifies high-risk users and asks them to verify themselves; and other unnamed customers using it to prevent account takeovers.
Stripe is far from being the only one working in this field: others include Jumio, which raised a big round earlier this year, Onfido, Veriff, Berbix, Passbase and more.
The launch of Stripe Identity comes a week after the company rolled out Stripe Tax, a new compliance tool that lets businesses automate the calculation and collection of sales tax, value-added tax (VAT), and goods and services tax (GST). It also creates comprehensive reports that make it easier for businesses to file taxes.
Commenting on the new launch, Stripe Identity head of engineering Rob Daly said, “Businesses have been asking us for an easy and fast way to verify identities online. Stripe Identity offers them just that.
“Now, any internet business — from a five-person startup to a multinational enterprise — can begin securely verifying the identities of their users in a matter of minutes, not weeks or months.”
Echoing a similar sentiment, Stripe head of Global Risk Strategy and Onboarding Policy Delia Pawelke added, “We know from experience how much work it takes to build a rigorous and secure system for global identity verification.
“With Stripe Identity, we’re making our advanced compliance infrastructure available to all of our users. For an online business, verifying someone’s identity is now as easy as accepting a payment.”
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