Database Verification: Setting match requirements (United States)

This guide describes Database Verifications that cover the United States. Learn about international Database Verifications here.

Overview

When you view a completed Database Verification, you see a match result for each piece of information about a user (such as first name, last name, or birthdate). For example, a match result might say that a user's first name was a "full" match.

Each match result tells you whether a piece of information about a user matches information in a known database. You can specify what it means for information to "match", using rules we call match requirements.

Below, we'll cover:

• Role of match requirements: How match requirements fit into the bigger picture of a Database Verification.
• Match requirement settings: Each match requirement has a comparison method, and a required match level. Persona provides strong default settings for each field you can collect in a Database Verification, but you can adjust these settings if you wish.
• Example match result: Learn how to interpret an example match result in the Persona Dashboard.

Role of match requirements

Match requirements are one of the settings you can configure in a Database Verification. Learn about other settings here. They are relevant to two commonly-used Verification checks, the Identity Comparison and Inquiry Comparison Verification checks.

• Match requirements are defined per-field. You can configure different match requirements for each piece of information about a user. For example, you can require their last name to match more closely to a known database, than their street name.
• You can specify multiple match requirements for one field: For each field, you can specify one or more match requirements. As long as one match requirement is met, the field will be considered a "match."

For US-based configurations, Persona offers a robust, field-specific matching logic by default. In most cases, the default match requirements are sufficient and do not require customization.

When you set up a US Database Verification's Identity Comparison check, you'll see comparison method options like "1 character off" or "70% similarity." These settings define the minimum threshold for what counts as an acceptable partial match, not the overall pass/fail result.

For example:

• Setting postal code to "1 character off" means at most 1 character difference counts as a partial match. An exact match returns a full match.
• Setting postal code to "0 characters off" means only an exact match is acceptable. All passing results would return as a full match. Nothing would pass as a partial.

The comparison method sets the line for "partial." The result you see (Full, Partial, or None) reflects how the user's data performed against that threshold.

Match requirement settings

Persona provides standard comparison methods. Some methods work on strings; some methods works on dates or addresses.

Here are some examples:

• Tokenization: Tokenization splits strings with whitespaces or hyphens into tokens and considers a partial match if at least one token matches. For example, "Mary-Anne" would have 1 token match with "Mary". By default a partial match is 1 token.
• Nickname matching: Determines if one string is a nickname of another string. For example, "Jim" is a nickname for "James".
• String difference: Determines if the edit distance between two strings is less than a specified threshold. For example, "Jim" and "Jin" have an edit distance of 1.
• String similarity: Uses matching algorithms to determine whether the similarity score between two strings is above a specified threshold.
• Date similarity: Determines whether two dates are the same. By default, a partial match here means that 2 out of 3 parts of a date—day, month, year—matched.

Match result example

Here's an example of what a match result looks like in the Persona Dashboard.

In the example below, there is a full match for First Name, Last Name, Date of Birth, Subdivision and Country Code. While there is no match for City.

Match requirements

The tooltip next to the match result shows each of the match requirements for this field. There are five match requirements. The image below is the tooltip for the First Name field.

For example, the first match requirement here is:

• Comparison method: String similarity
• Required match level: Partial

"Failed" match requirements

Five of the six match requirements passed. They have a green “Passed” next to them.

One match requirement did not pass: City. Indicated with the red “Failed.”

Overall result

As mentioned earlier, if you specify multiple match requirements, as long as one match requirement is met, the field will be considered a "match."

Here, one of the match requirements produced a full match. So, the overall result is a full match.