The Need for Speed: Conclusive ID Document Verification at the Speed of a Formula One Race Car

Some say that the most meaningful things in life are worth the wait, but there are several things in life that are even more amazing because of their speed. 

For example, there are a lot of mind-blowing things that can happen in less than three seconds: Formula One cars go from 0 to 60 in 2.6 seconds¹ and Cheetahs go from 0 to 60 in 3 seconds.² 

And with all the recent enhancements to our Predictive DocV solution, we are now returning a conclusive response for an identity document verification check in just 2 seconds.

How Did Predictive DocV Get So Fast?

Over the past several months, the Predictive DocV team has been making strides and improvements to our product. The integration of the Berbix technology into the Predictive DocV Solution saw an immediate drop in response time that has continued to improve with our capture app enhancements and the implementation of our real-image quality checks after each capture which minimizes resubmits. 

The performance speaks for itself:

Predictive DocV has over 95% conclusive results compared to the industry norm of 80%, and as the P95 Latency graph shows below, our response time is now under 2 seconds.

ID Document Verification Provider Approaches

Across the identity verification industry, there are two broad approaches to how automated an ID document verification solution should be. 

Fully or partially manual 

Companies that have response times higher than one minute typically fall into this category. An actual human is often on the other side of the screen validating, transcribing, or comparing information. The benefit of having a human reviewing the document verifications is that humans tend to be extremely versatile and possess intuition.

On the other hand, relying on human reviewers presents several issues. They have conscious and unconscious bias, get tired or lose focus, and production incentives can influence judgment. And as generative AI and other tools evolve to create fake ID documents that are visually indistinguishable, the ability for a human to catch identity fraud becomes increasingly difficult.  

Response times for these systems are typically between one and five minutes, but can be significantly longer if there is a large backlog of document verifications.

Automatic

The contrasting approach to manual review is fully automatic. For these vendors, automated systems are fully responsible for final recommendations. They are trained by data previously collected by the systems and because they are automated, they are consistent – identical data will yield an identical decision every time. The specific outcomes of a given document verification can be configurable based on signals extracted during the document verification process.

While the systems are consistent, they may be subject to training data bias. Depending on the system itself, the accuracy of the data extracted can be variable. Computers are difficult to train to detect novel situations without supervision and it may be harder for a system to detect one-off identity fraud vectors. Therefore, it’s paramount to select a document verification vendor that focuses on reducing bias and training its system with accurate, robust data. 

Response times for these systems are typically less than 30 seconds, but can be as low as 0-1.5 seconds.

How the Solutions Stack Up 

Automated identity verification software clearly provides much faster response times than vendors relying on manual reviews, yet even the response times for automated solutions can still vary extensively. 

When it comes to ID document verification, speed and accuracy go hand in hand. Socure’s fully automated document verification solution leverages advanced AI and computer vision technology to provide exceptionally fast and accurate results. With a median response time of under 1.5 seconds, we are setting the new industry standard for speed — without compromising integrity. 

Want to see Predictive DocV in action? Sign up for a live demo here.

¹How fast is an F1 car?
²Now Scientists Can Accurately Guess The Speed Of Any Animal