If you are a Customer Experience Product Manager or Risk and Compliance Officer still relying on Document-Based KYC instead of Bank-Verified Identity, you’ll already know that it’s impacting on conversion, manual review load, fraud exposure, and how quickly you can evidence decisions when things go wrong.
Bank-Verified Identity uses identity data already verified by a customer’s bank, shared with explicit consent. Document-Based KYC relies on a customer uploading an ID document (often with selfie and liveness checks) and your provider validating it. Below, we dive into how these two different approaches impact onboarding and compliance.
For Document-Based KYC, the moment where users are asked to upload documents and take selfies is the moment where applications stall. Users switch devices, lighting fails, documents are rejected, and support tickets spike. And sometimes, it’s just because the user doesn’t want to see themselves on camera that day.
In financial services, Signicat reports an abandonment rate of 63% for onboarding applications.
Bank-Verified Identity side-steps the document capture problem and leverages the fact that the bank has already done this in the past; the bank has verified their user before. The user authenticates with their bank and consents to share the specific attributes you need (for example name, DOB, address), which reduces steps and helps keep onboarding moving.
Document-Based KYC can confirm a document looks genuine (for example, that the ID scan passes authenticity checks), but it does not automatically answer whether the identity has a credible footprint beyond that document.
That matters as identity fraud volumes keep climbing. Cifas recorded over 217,000 cases in the first half of 2025, and flags AI as a consistent driver.
Bank-Verified Identity is anchored to an existing bank relationship and bank-held identity proofing, giving you stronger evidence that the person is real, not just “document-presenting”.
For higher-risk onboarding, OneID also layers in signals designed to flag “no evidence the identity exists”, which is useful when you are trying to reduce synthetic identity exposure.
Document-Based KYC is often a snapshot: you store what the customer uploaded at onboarding, then you carry refresh risk and data retention risk.
Bank-Verified Identity is easier to treat as ongoing verification because you can pull up-to-date attributes from the source when the customer consents, rather than relying on an old scan. That is practical for change-of-details, step-up checks, and re-authentication.
It can also support age verification without ID upload when you only need an age threshold (for example, 18+) rather than a full document and image capture flow.
UK fraud losses keep the pressure on both security and UX. UK Finance reports APP fraud gross losses of £257.5m in H1 2025 (up 12%), with 66% of cases enabled by online sources.
If you are reviewing “what should I look for in an identity provider”, start with whether the provider can deliver high-assurance outcomes while reducing drop-off, and whether it returns audit-ready evidence with minimal data collection.
That is the gap Bank-Verified Identity is designed to close.
If you want to pressure-test your current KYC verification solution against a bank-backed approach, speak to OneID® about a side-by-side pilot using the same funnel and risk policy.