What is Address Validation?
Address verification is the process of validating an address associated with an individual or entity, such as a home or business address.
Address validation may be conducted for several reasons. The most common application of address verification is during the standard Know Your Customer (KYC) used when a business or financial institution verifies the identity of a new client during the customer onboarding process.
Address Verification as a Know Your Customer (KYC) Check
Know Your Customer (KYC) is a term that refers to procedures and mechanisms that are used to verify the identity of customers before conducting business with them.
When conducting KYC checks, a business will typically be verifying:
- That an individual exists
- Whether that individual is exactly who they claim to be
- Whether that individual is eligible to receive the product or service in question
- Whether that individual poses a threat of money laundering or other such crime
- Address verification often forms part of the selection of KYC checks that businesses run on their customers – examples include a bank requiring proof of residence before they can approve a client’s loan request.
Address verification, therefore, forms a crucial part of helping a business to verify that an individual is who they claim to be and that all the information associated with them is correct.
Online Address Verification
The rise of online identity verification and data validation tools has revolutionized identity verification and data validation systems.
Online tools enable highly efficient, accurate and cost-effective means for identity verification and data validation. Today, online identity verification leverages powerful technologies like biometric information and artificial intelligence to deliver incredibly accurate and reliable identity verification.
Online identity verification allows for the verification of remote individuals – clients and individuals on the other side of the world can easily verify themselves, while businesses have the capacity to efficiently verify new clients, customers and employees in a seamless remote-onboarding process.
Furthermore, the personal information necessary for the verification of an individual’s identity can be pulled from a variety of trusted and secure sources, thereby increasing the reliability of the verification.
Why is Address Verification Important?
Businesses, financial institutions and organizations will typically conduct address verification checks because they are legally required to do so by a country’s national regulator. For example, in South Africa, any business, financial institution or organization that is designated as an Accountable Institution (AI) by the Financial Intelligence Centre (FIC) is legally bound by a range of regulatory compliance obligations.
These regulatory compliance obligations form a critical part of a country’s Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) obligations, which hold businesses legally accountable for taking steps to combat the threat of money laundering by, for example, verifying identities of the clients they do business with. Address verification checks may also be used in instances that require an enhanced degree of risk assessment and risk mitigation – examples include the processing of Politically Exposed Persons (PEPS).
Notably, it may be in a business’s best interests to conduct risk assessment and risk mitigation procedures above and beyond what is required by a regulator. Address verification acts as a screening process that helps ensure a business only onboards new clients that are legitimate, thereby shielding the business from malicious actors who seek to commit fraud or engage in criminal acts that have the potential to harm the business by proxy.
Address Verification During Customer Onboarding and Employee Onboarding
Address verification is a relatively common tool for identity verification within the customer onboarding process, although its application will vary depending on the business and product in question. Oftentimes, however, a business is legally obligated to verify the personal information of their clients before conducting business with them, which may entail a legal requirement to verify the individual’s associated addresses.
For employee onboarding, the verification of employee information, such as associated addresses, is a good method by which a business can test the integrity of an employee and ensure that they are not fraudulent. Employees who provide false information during the application process pose a significantly higher risk of being malicious and committing occupational fraud in the future, so validating the information supplied by employees is a good way to better verify the integrity of a prospective employee.
Whatever the reason for or application of an address verification check, there are several means by which a business can conduct such a check and even seamlessly integrate them into their customer and employee onboarding processes, with the capacity to easily automate the process through the seamless integration of an API.
API for Automated Address Verification
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) can be understood as mechanisms that enable two or more software components to communicate with each other using established protocols and definitions.
In the context of identity verification and data validation – such as the address verification process – an API enables a business to build the necessary software into the relevant customer and employee onboarding processes, thereby ensuring a seamless and efficient verification process.
APIs are a perfect tool for those businesses and institutions that demand the capacity to process vast amounts of address verification requests simultaneously and quickly. APIs empower these businesses to streamline their address verification requirements by building them into an automated process that can automatically conduct the necessary checks, completing the entire process in an automated and digital manner.
By automating intensive administrative tasks, the automation of such checks frees up valuable human resources and enables their energy to be better spent elsewhere in the business. The automation of identity verification tasks, therefore, not only saves time and money by creating efficient digital processes, but also creates value by freeing up invaluable human capital within the organization.
ThisIsMe’s advanced API offerings give businesses the tools they need to seamlessly integrate advanced identity verification and information validation tools, while still maintaining the highest standards for customer experience.
For businesses, institutions and organizations that process smaller amounts of requests and do not require the integration of an API to meet their demands, ThisIsMe’s Partners Platform provides access to our solutions on a subscription or pay-as-you-go basis. This ensures that our suite of world-class solutions remains accessible to clients of all sizes and at all price points.
Online Address Verification Services South Africa
ThisIsMe is proud to offer a leading solution for online address verification. Our address validation service only requires an individual’s Identity Document (ID) number and will return a list of addresses associated with that number, while the Address Lookup Plus will return a list of addresses associated with an ID number and a map of its associated location.
As South Africa’s leading provider of world-class due diligence and remote-onboarding solutions, ThisIsMe is proud to be at the forefront of a trust-based and privacy-compliant digital world. We offer a wide range of FICA-compliant KYC services that encompass politically exposed person checks, account verification services, and company sanction and credit checks. To experience our full suite of due diligence solutions and see how we can help your business verify client information and meet its AML/CFT regulatory obligations, book a demonstration by contacting our team here.
