What is OCR (Optical Character Recognition) - Melissa UK
Optical character recognition (OCR) has become an increasingly vital tool in verifying people's identities. When combined with intelligent database technology, Optical Character Recognition can be critical in avoiding possible fraud and being an effective tool within digital identity verification and know your customer (KYC) regulations.

Why use OCR for identity verification?

In financial circumstances—such as onboarding new bank customers, writing insurance policies, conducting underwriting and mortgage processes, verifying credit card authenticity, processing transactions, and heading off identity theft—making sure people are who they say they are essential.

People may present identifying documents like driver’s licenses, visas, passports, credit cards or national ID cards, but these are easy to forge. Optical Character Recognition technology combined with intelligent database matching can verify driver’s licenses, residential permits, passports, and other documents remotely and with ease. The technology can determine if the identity document is authentic and genuine.

Optical Character Recognition combined with intelligent data extraction technology can retrieve information from official documents in a wide variety of external databases and can be compared with what is claimed by the owner of the document. That verifies identity, and also can pull up information about potential customers and associates around the world. This is done by analysing reference data—things like addresses, emails, mobile phone numbers, age and even the final four digits of Social Security numbers—to match and verify any submitted document.

We see this technology being a part of the popular KYC & AML solution, ID document verification. This solution as a whole allows businesses to remotely verify individuals by taking a photo of their chosen ID document, like a passport or driver's license, then matching it with a selfie taken on their smartphone to then finish off with a liveness check, all in an easy 1-2-3 step process.

We have a dedicated article on What is ID Document Verification if you would like to know more.

Why partner with Melissa to assure better identity verification?

The power of optical character recognition and its ability to satisfy Know Your Customer regulations comes from its linkage to intelligent systems and sophisticated database matching. Melissa uses this technology to capture identity documentation, either in-person or remotely, by digitally scanning documents such as passports or national ID cards It authenticates submissions in real-time with multi-sourced data, and standardises, corrects, and matches customer records globally.

Melissa Identity solutions ensure that compliance activities are seamless while creating a straightforward, friction-free experience.

250+ Countries & Territories
1,000,555,787+ Addresses Verified
35+ Years
10,000+ Customers Worldwide