You’ll know that customer identity verification (IDV) is crucial for all businesses operating online and with remote customers today. The right platform can help you build trust with customers, while also helping prevent fraud and meet complex compliance demands, such as those around evolving anti-money laundering (AML) and know your customer (KYC) requirements.

But how do you find the perfect IDV provider for your company – one that will be able to meet your ever-evolving needs of tomorrow as well as your immediate needs of today?

In a complex and rapidly changing marketplace, it is important to select the right solution for you. This guide will help you understand how to evaluate your specific IDV needs and grasp the nuances between IDV providers.

At the most basic level, any IDV solution will ensure customers are who they say they are – and play a crucial role in foreseeing and preventing fraud, ensuring compliance with regulations, and supporting AML efforts.

These concerns will differ depending on the size of your company and the industry you work in, of course, but the right IDV solution will help you optimize and tailor your service for your customer base, with all that means for customer loyality and the future growth of your company.

According to the Veriff’s Identity Fraud Report 2025, global fraud increased by more than 20% year-on-year. And, while global fraud is on the rise, the risk changes across different industries and categories.

In financial services, there was growth in fraudulent transactions across the board, but some industries were hit worse than others. For example, payments saw a massive 54% increase in fraudulent activity, while e-commerce saw a 40% increase.

That’s why selecting a provider that meets your specific needs is vital.

There are many different types of IDV providers, offering different levels of service from their solutions at wildly varying costs.

The key before choosing is to first establish what’s important for your company, then ask if each IDV provider truly meets those aims.

The right platform will provide your company with a smooth verification flow, gathering data for analysis during verification sessions in a way that is easy and unobtrusive for customers.

It will offer the best verification engine, analysing the data that the customers provide. And it will provide a platform that lets you view and manage verifications as they occur. Such offerings are good for business – and good for your brand.

So where do you go from here?

In order to find an IDV provider that meets your specific needs and risks, ask yourself the following questions – so you can enter into conversations equipped with the right information and a clear picture of your requirements.

What is your current fraud rate with your current IDV partner?

This will give you a sense of whether a new provider can handle your volume of checks and the breadth of fraud risks you face.

What types of fraud are you seeing most? 

Over half of all fraud we are seeing at present is identity fraud. This includes impersonation and document fraud, and fraud powered by artificial intelligence and deepfakes. But this will differ depending what industry and geographic regions you cover. For example, chargeback fraud is particularly prevalent in ecommerce and online marketplaces, but account takeover fraud is more common in financial services verticals. By knowing what your fraud risk is, you will better be able to define what solution will work best for you. 

Every vendor claims accuracy, speed, breadth of coverage, AI performance, superior fraud detection, and all of the slides, demos, and marketing materials will over-index on the positives without showing true performance differences.

The reality is that testing is the only way to understand whether a solution will synchronize with your existing processes and provide you with the results you expect. Veriff’s implementation teams report that there can be a 5-20% swing across all key KPIs and these numbers only surface themselves in a true testing environment.

For example, different vendors perform well on different document types, on documents from different countries or geographic regions, and in cases where the verification user is in a non-optimal environment (such as when there are lighting issues, glare, a damaged document, or low-end devices with limited camera capability). Testing also surfaces those edge cases that drive most of the headaches post-integration.

And let’s face it, the cost of making the wrong choice with this decision can be catastrophic.

The truth is that all vendors will claim to stop fraud, but do they? Testing is the only way to find out. Fraud evolves faster than most vendors and fraud rings move between weak vendors - if you don’t test, you inherit the vendor’s blind spots. Testing also shows whether a vendor can adapt in real time or if they rely on static logic.

User experience is another thing to test. Workflow design impacts conversion more than people expect and UI/UX, retry logic, fallback steps, and resubmissions vary meaningfully by vendor. Demos do not show how real users behave in your actual flow, only testing does.

All of this boils down to the fact that testing is the only way to prove return on investment from one vendor to another. It is the only way to validate conversion and fraud detection rates, speed of decision-making, ease of use, and, biggest of all, cost.

Side-by-side tests give you a data-backed answer, not a theoretical one, and in a crowded market testing becomes the differentiator. At Veriff, we believe that buyers can’t rely on claims or feature lists - it is through testing that they de-risk the process of selecting a vendor and we stand by our product performance.