Documents

About Documents

Documents helps you collect and analyze documents that are not government-issued IDs—such as SSN cards, W2s, IRS notices, utility bills—from individuals or companies.

You can:

• Securely collect and analyze documents
• Automatically extract fields from collected documents
• Review collected documents quickly and easily

You can also run a set of basic fraud checks on Documents.

Use cases

You may use documents as proof of address, proof of SSN, proof of EIN, or other similar validations in your user diligence or business diligence process. Documents can help your organization automate a large portion of what is often manual and time-consuming work for this diligence.

Get started

If you're interested in Documents, please reach out to your customer success manager or contact the Persona support team.

Securely collect and analyze documents

You can use Documents to securely request and collect a variety of documents from your end users. Certain types of documents can be automatically classified.

Collect documents

You can collect documents as part of your existing Persona identity verification flow, or as a standalone document request.

Popular Persona flows include:

• Document only (request one or more documents)
• Government ID Verification + Selfie Verification + document
• Database Verification with a fallback to Government ID Verification + Selfie Verification + document

You can incorporate Documents via API or by integrating via Persona's hosted or embedded UI flow. If you integrate our UI, you can customize the copy on the screens where you request a document to outline which documents you are requesting and which documents are acceptable.

Secure Document Collection can be used without any other Documents features, simply as a way to securely collect and store documents.

You can link collected documents back to an Account within Persona via a reference ID. You can then view all documents collected for an end user, along with the rest of that user's Persona record—including Verifications, Reports, and more—within the Account.

Automatically classify document type

For specific document types, Persona can automatically classify the type of document. Classification is performed by using a combination of machine learning, machine vision, and rule-based techniques.

Supported types include:

• Government forms (e.g. W-2, W-9, 1040)
• Vehicle-related documents (e.g. vehicle insurance card, title, registration)
• Statements from financial institutions (e.g. bank statements, credit card statements)

We are actively adding new types of supported documents. Reach out to your customer success manager or contact our support team.

Automatically extract fields

Persona can extract specific information from a document by leveraging optical character recognition (OCR). Note that extraction accuracy is dependent on the quality of the images provided.

Extract exact values, or by type of field

Persona offers two different types of extraction:

• Guided extraction: You tell Persona the value you're looking for in the document (for example, the name of a business, an address, or an EIN). This information is used to guide OCR of the document. This form of extraction has relatively high accuracy.
• Unguided extraction: You ask Persona to look for a specific type of field (for example, name, SSN, EIN, date) within a document. Persona then uses pattern matching to find values in the document—for example, by looking for a series of numbers that match the format of an EIN. Unguided extraction is typically 60-80% accurate. For example, we may find a series of dates that match the format of a date within the document—one of which is the date you are looking for.

Guided extraction is recommended whenever possible because it has higher accuracy. Unguided extraction can be useful when the exact value that is being extracted from the document is unknown.

Persona currently supports the following properties for unguided extraction:

• Address
• Business name
• Date
• EIN
• Individual name
• Phone number
• Price
• SSN

Take action based on document extraction

With either type of extraction (guided or unguided), we recommend that you use Workflows and Cases to establish business logic for approving, declining, or manually reviewing documents based on the outcome of document extraction.

Review collected documents

You can view each collected document within the Document Viewer in the Persona Dashboard.

The Document Viewer displays the document alongside a list of each extracted value, which helps you quickly review the document. You can click on an extracted value to scroll to the place in the document where it was extracted.

Run fraud checks

Persona can run certain fraud checks on documents to look for instances where a document has been tampered with editing software, is publicly found online, or is missing required fields.

The following types of fraud checks can be run on documents:

• Detect compromised documents: Checks the submitted document against sets of known compromised documents and flags if there is a match.
• Flag document modification: Detects if a document has been tampered with by an editing tool after its creation.
• Verify extracted information: Verifies properties found on the document (e.g. EIN) against government and other databases.
• Check for recency: Ensures that a document (e.g. utility bill) has been issued within a period of X days (e.g. 30, 60, 90 days).

FAQ

How does Documents work?

Documents works just like Persona's Government ID flow. Your user will be prompted to upload their document. In a few seconds, Persona analyzes the document and, depending on your customized criteria, either accepts the document, fails it, or sends it to manual review.

What types of documents can Persona accept?

Persona accepts a variety of documents. To learn more, reach out to your customer success manager or contact our support team.

Can I require that certain properties exist in a document in order for it to be accepted?

Yes. For example, let's say your organization wants to only accept documents that contain an address. Persona can recognize whether a document has an address on it and if it does, allow the user to upload it successfully, or if not, prompt the user to try again.

What file types can Persona accept?

Persona accepts PDF, JPG/JPEG, PNG, HEIC/HEIF, and TIF/TIFF files. You can further configure which file types you want to accept in an Inquiry flow.

Is there a size limit for each file that is uploaded?

Each file can be up to 10MB.

Is there a page limit for PDFs that are uploaded?

Each PDF can have up to 20 pages.