Persona's key concepts

In this lesson, our solutions engineer Nina will walk through a user journey as it relates to the Persona objects you’ll encounter.

Persona is made up of many building blocks and features, so this is meant to be an introduction to those building blocks.

Let’s go back to Elephant Company (our fictitious company). Elephant credit wants to KYC users onto their platform using Persona. The first thing they’re going to do is to create an Inquiry for the end user, where an inquiry is defined as a single instance of a user verifying their inquiry.

This inquiry will be attached to an Account. Just like a user has an account on your platform, they’ll also have an account in Persona. This is so you can easily access all of their inquiries they’ve performed over their customer history.

Now this user needs to go through the Inquiry. Persona inquiries can collect all sorts of information from the user, but the backbone of a KYC inquiry is going to be its verifications, where a verification is a Persona method to verify a user’s information.

Our most common verification types are Government ID and Selfie, but we offer others such as database and document verification.

Each verification is made up of a handful of specific verification checks, which you’re able to configure to specify what you believe a passing verification means.

For example, if Elephant Credit can’t accept expired IDs, they would require our Expired Detection check, otherwise they’d leave it as not required. For each verification to pass, all of its required checks must pass.

Once the user has finished all of their verifications, a Persona Workflow will be triggered. Workflows are Persona’s automation engine, and they’re most commonly used when the user has finished with their verifications, to orchestrate decisioning or business logic.

Let’s say Elephant Credit has a requirement to run sanctions screenings on all of their users. So they configure a workflow to automatically run Persona’s Watchlist and Politically Exposed Persons reports after the user has completed their inquiry. Any hits on those reports need to be manually reviewed, so the workflow will create a Persona Case for someone on the Elephant team to take a closer look.

Suppose Elephant Credit is currently only US-based, so they want to manually review users who are trying to onboard from outside of the US. They can add in workflow logic to create a case if Persona has detected that the IP address on the inquiry is coming from outside of the US.

At the end of the day, the inquiry will either be approved or declined, where the status should reflect how you have decisioned the user— approved meaning that you can continue to do business with them, and declined meaning that you should block them from your platform.

On the engineering side, your team should be listening to the inquiry status changes and use that to either continue or block the user in your flow.