The four stages of a know-your-customer check
Stage one is identification: a government document is read, its machine-readable zone parsed and its security features scored. Stage two is liveness — a selfie or short video proving the person holding the document is present and real. Stage three is address confirmation from a utility bill, bank statement or official letter inside a date window, usually ninety days. Stage four is screening against sanctions and politically-exposed-person lists.
Each stage fails independently. A perfect document with a stale address proof stalls exactly as hard as a missing document.
Which documents are required
In practice: one photo identity document (passport page, national ID both sides, or driving licence both sides), one liveness capture, and one address proof dated inside the window. Business onboarding adds the registration certificate, ownership structure, tax identification and a business bank record.
Our document packs mirror that list exactly — front and back captures, a passport page with a legible machine-readable zone, address proof, selfie frames and the liveness sequence — because a pack missing one item behaves like no pack at all.
Where submissions actually fail
Glare across the machine-readable zone. A cropped corner. An address proof outside the date window. A name order that differs between document and profile. A selfie taken in lighting that flattens facial depth. None of these are fraud; all of them produce a rejection, and repeated rejections put a profile in a manual queue that takes far longer than getting it right once.
Consistency across the set matters as much as quality within it. The name, spelling, transliteration and address must read the same on every file, in the same order.
How long verification takes
Automated decisions land in minutes when the set is clean. Manual review runs one to five business days, longer for business onboarding where a human reads the ownership chain. Enhanced due diligence on higher-risk categories can run a fortnight.
If you want the short version: submit a complete, consistent, in-date set the first time. Every shortcut taken at submission is repaid with interest in queue time.