Digital identity verification: which vendors are you using?

We're updating our remote onboarding flow and need to select a digital identity verification provider. Key requirements:

• Document verification (passports, national IDs, driving licenses)
• Biometric matching (selfie vs. document photo)
• Liveness detection
• Global coverage (at least 150 countries)
• AML screening integration

Currently evaluating Onfido, Jumio, Sumsub, and Veriff. Would love to hear real-world experiences — especially around accuracy rates, false rejection rates, and customer drop-off during onboarding.

We've been using Onfido for about 2 years across EU and LATAM markets. Pros: excellent document coverage, solid API, and their Studio dashboard is great for workflow customization. Cons: liveness detection had some issues with older Android devices initially (improved since), and pricing can be steep at volume.

Our onboarding completion rate improved from 72% to 88% after switching from manual document upload to Onfido's SDK. The biggest win was reducing manual review from ~30% of applications to ~8%.

Consider also looking at regulatory acceptance in your jurisdictions. Some regulators have specific requirements for identity verification technology (e.g., the German BaFin has guidelines on video identification). Make sure whichever vendor you choose meets the regulatory standard in every market you operate in, not just the technical standard.

Something worth considering beyond vendor selection: how you handle edge cases matters more than the happy path. Every identity verification vendor works great for a 30-year-old with a US passport and a clean selfie. Where they differ is how they handle:

• Older documents — Some countries issue IDs valid for 10+ years. Vendors that can't read faded or older-format documents create unnecessary friction for legitimate customers.
• Non-Latin scripts — If you onboard customers globally, make sure your vendor handles Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Cyrillic names correctly. Transliteration errors cause cascading problems in downstream screening.
• Accessibility — Customers with disabilities, elderly customers who struggle with selfie capture, or people in low-bandwidth areas. If your vendor's only channel is a smartphone app with facial recognition, you're excluding a significant population.

We ended up using a primary vendor for standard flows and a manual review fallback for edge cases. It costs more but our customer abandonment rate dropped by about 15% compared to a vendor-only approach.

Also: negotiate your pricing based on verification volume, not per-check. At scale, the difference between per-check and volume pricing is enormous.

We use Sumsub and have been happy with it. The price-to-feature ratio is excellent, especially for a startup. Their AML screening is built-in, which saved us from needing a separate vendor. Global coverage is good.

One caveat: their support can be slow outside of business hours if you're not on an enterprise plan.