From ensuring regulatory compliance to safeguarding against fraud, verifying a customer’s address is crucial for maintaining secure and compliant operations.
What is proof of address and why is it necessary?
Proof of address is a step in the verification process that confirms an individual’s current residential address. Address verification has been a fundamental business practice, but with rising fraud, it has become more essential for businesses to adopt efficient, reliable, and secure methods.
Proof of address is commonly required during KYC processes, such as opening bank accounts or applying for loans in an effort to prevent fraud or money laundering. With rising rates of identity theft, address verification is a crucial step in a layered fraud-prevention approach. Verifying the individual’s address helps businesses establish a layer of trust with the customer during the KYC process.
Obtaining proof of address also allows businesses to communicate effectively with customers or users, ensuring important documents. bills, or legal notices that are sent through the mail are received.
The traditional approach to proof of address
Historically, the process of verifying proof of address has involved the manual review of documents, such as utility bills, bank statements, or government-issued letters. These documents serve as physical evidence of a person’s residence. However, this method comes with several limitations.
Many documents used to show proof of address are not regulated or secure, making it nearly impossible to spot forgeries. The lack of standardization also makes the process more time-consuming and prone to errors, both when verifying and inputting the information. these limitations leave businesses exposed to heightened risk of fraud and slows down operations.
Efficient and reliable proof of address
The limitations of traditional proof of address verification have led many businesses to adopt a more efficient and reliable solution by utilizing third-party database checks. These checks leverage extensive databases to instantly verify a customer’s address, providing a much faster, more secure, and scalable alternative to manual document review.
IDScan.net offers instant address verification that cross-references the provided address against records from trusted sources like the United States Postal Service (USPS).
Verifying a customer’s address using a third party database check allows for real-time verification to quickly and accurately confirm the information. The automated process also eliminates the risk of human error – either mistyping information or misreading a non-standardized document like a utility bill.
