What is driver’s license verification?

Governments require adults operating vehicles to obtain a driver’s license all around the world. These physical cards include unique identifiers about each person, commonly including their birth date, address, height, weight, and more.

They’re often used by businesses for identity verification, or the process of confirming a person’s identity. This is often done by examining documents like passports, national identity cards, and driver's licenses.

Driver's license verification is a popular document verification method among businesses. Let's explore how it’s performed and its benefits to specific industries.

How drivers license verification works

Technology today is making it easier for businesses to verify the identity of their customers. As part of a typical onboarding process, companies will have their customers download a mobile app for document verification. The customer, using the app, captures a high-quality image of the front and back of their driver’s license.

Once the customer captures the images, they upload them within the application. The document verification software analyzes the information, extracting data from the images. Artificial intelligence (AI) assesses whether the document is genuine or fraudulent.

It verifies the visual, data, and metadata elements of the driver’s license in seconds to determine its authenticity.

Drivers license verification for transportation

A driver’s license is more than just a document for driving. However, the transportation industry certainly conducts the most driver’s license verification. Whether customers are drivers, renters, or ride-sharing users, a driver’s license provides businesses a simple form of document verification.

Rental car companies often rely on driver’s license verification apps for user onboarding. This makes it easy for customers to rent a vehicle in seconds and avoid filling out unnecessary paperwork. Digital identity verification software is also used to detect falsified or fake driver’s licenses, keeping illegal drivers off the roads.

Benefits of drivers license verification

Customers today expect a frictionless onboarding experience, whether they’re renting a car or signing a company’s offer sheet. When identity verification is cumbersome or complex, it dissuades customers from completing the process. A driver’s license is a readily available document that makes the process easier and thus, improves customer acquisition rates.

For certain industries, KYC and AML regulations mandate that customer identification and verification must happen at onboarding. Driver’s license verification is just one of the ways businesses around the world ensure they’re meeting these regulatory standards.

Businesses also want to identify fraudsters before they can access their services. Driver’s license ID verification is a trusted method for fraud prevention. Every valid ID card is issued by a government agency and easily verified as genuine or fraudulent.

How does Onfido support your identity verification needs?

Our Verification Suite includes document and biometric verification solutions, trusted data sources, and fraud detection signals to help businesses meet their KYC needs. 

As part of our document verification solution, we support driver’s licenses from more than 195 countries. Our Smart Capture SDK delivers a fast, efficient capture and upload experience for customers. They simply take a photo of their driver’s license, and our image enhancement technology captures a burst of photos and automatically selects the best one. The UI offers an easy verification experience for customers and improves onboarding time for businesses. Our solution extracts the driver’s age and license classification so you can ensure they are eligible to rent a particular vehicle. In the United States, data captured during document verification is assessed against trusted and reliable data from the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA). We match identity data against local Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) records to detect synthetic, duplicate, or false identities.

Interested in learning more about our driver’s license verification solution?

Take an interactive tour of the Real Identity Platform and explore our library of global verifications and signals.

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