Persona Help Center
Hosted Flow Quickstart Guide
In this video, we’ll help you get started with Persona’s Hosted Flow.
The Hosted Flow is a full window experience hosted by Persona. One unique aspect of the Hosted Flow is that it requires no engineering effort. You can get started with it in just a matter of minutes.
Before you begin with any implementation method, you should have at least one Persona solution added to your Organization. As a reminder, our pre-built solutions provide a great way to get started with several Persona products.
For this demonstration, I’m going to be using the Progressive verification solution. This solution includes the following
An Inquiry template containing two different types of verifications
And two Workflows that perform automation and conditional logic after each individual completes the flow
When using the Hosted Flow, we can create new Inquiries in a few different ways. The first is done manually via the Persona dashboard.
On the “All Inquiries” page, click the Create Inquiry button. You’ll be prompted to select an Inquiry Template, and can optionally provide a reference ID. Click the Create Inquiry button, and you’ll receive a link to the newly created Inquiry. You can subsequently surface the link to the end-user in your own system, or via your preferred communication method.
If you prefer to have Persona email this hyperlink to the recipient, check the box to “send email to recipient”. In the subsequent modal, you’ll have the opportunity to customize details such as the email subject and body text.
Secondly, you can use Hosted Flow to generate a user-facing link that creates an Inquiry.
In the left-side navigation bar, go to Integrations, then Guides. Click on the Hosted Flow tab, second from the left. When you scroll down, you. can select a template from which to generate the shareable Hosted Flow link.
The third option is to create inquiries via API. This is a good option if you want to create inquiries for your users ahead of time. Because we’re using the Hosted Flow, you’ll still need a mechanism to surface the relevant inquiry to each user.
The Hosted Flow supports query string parameters that you can use to customize the user’s experience. We group supported parameters into three categories:
- Parameters used when creating new inquiries
- Parameters used to resume existing inquiries
- And all other parameters
If you grab the Hosted Flow link from the Integration Guides, you’ll notice that it already includes two parameters: inquiry-template-id and environment-id.
Other common parameters used when creating new inquiries include:
- reference-id or account-id to connect the inquiry to a specific account on Persona
- And fields that preset inquiry field values like name, birthdate, address, and more.
When resuming existing inquiries, you’ll need to include parameters for the inquiry-id and a session-token. Check out the documentation below this video if you’d like to learn more.
The last category of “other parameters” are not specific to creating or resuming inquiries. These are general user experience related parameters, such as:
- Specifying the language to display and
- Specifying where to send the user after they successfully verify their identity
Although the Hosted Flow requires no code, engineering support can help scale and optimize your implementation.
For example, consider the data retrieval process. Many organizations that cannot dedicate engineering resources will access Inquiry results manually via the dashboard. Organizations with engineering support tend to implement more automated data retrieval solutions such as webhooks and API polling. We’ll include some resources below this video if you’d like to learn more.
Additional resources