What is a claim type?
A claim type defines what you want to confirm about a user, such as whether they are over 18 or whether a real person is present. Each claim type encodes two things: the level of assurance required, and the verification methods used to evaluate it.
Claim types are pre-built. Persona designs each one against published regulatory guidance, standards, and industry best practices for the market and use case it covers, so you are not deciding for yourself what counts as a sound age check in each country.
That makes Relay deliberately opinionated. You do not assemble a flow, you pick the claim type that matches the question you need answered and the market you need it answered in.
How you use a claim type
Every claim type has an ID. Your integration passes that ID when it creates a Relay session, and that single value determines what gets verified and how thoroughly.
Navigate to the Dashboard and click on Relay > Claim Types to see every claim type available to you. The table lists each one with its ID, description, supported use cases, and verification methods. Copy the ID directly from the table and paste it into your integration.
The two families of claim type
Humanness
Humanness claim types confirm that a real, live person is present at the time of verification. They help protect your product from automated or synthetic activity, and they apply different levels of assurance depending on your use case.
Common uses are account signup and onboarding, holding back automated traffic and scraping, and protecting feeds and discovery surfaces.
Age
Age claim types evaluate whether a user meets an age threshold, based on the level of assurance and the jurisdiction you select.
Age requirements vary across regions and keep changing. Persona Atlas is an open database that tracks age assurance regulations across markets, and it is a good place to start if you are working out which claim type applies where.
Verification methods
A claim type supports one or more methods. A method is how Relay actually evaluates the claim during the user-facing flow.
| Method | What it does |
|---|---|
| Facial age estimation | Checks whether a user meets your age threshold by capturing a selfie and estimating their age. |
| Document with selfie | Confirms a user’s age from their government ID, matched to a selfie to make sure it’s really them. |
| Live selfie | Confirms a real, live person is present by capturing a selfie and checking for liveness. |
Where a claim type supports more than one method, Relay runs the verification flow and determines which supported method to use for that session. You do not configure the method yourself, because the choice is part of what the claim type encodes.
Persona tunes how each method is applied per claim type rather than applying one generic configuration everywhere. Confirming that someone is over 18 in the United Kingdom is not the same job as confirming it in Brazil, and the claim types reflect that. The specifics of how each method is calibrated are part of Persona’s implementation and are not published.
Knowing which method was used
When you redeem the claim result, the payload can include a methodology field naming the method that produced it. Values are facial_age_estimation, document_selfie, or live_selfie. It is worth storing alongside the result for your records.
Two claim types deliberately leave it out. Age 18+ France and Age 18+ Italy do not disclose the method in the redeemed result, because withholding it is part of the privacy expectations those claim types are designed around. Everything else about the result is unchanged. If your integration reads the methodology field, make sure it handles the field being absent.
Every claim type
Claim types shown here are available to all plans. The Dashboard is the source of truth for what your organization can use today.
| Claim type | Methods |
|---|---|
| Live Human Presence | Live selfie |
| Age 18+ Germany | Facial age estimation, Document with selfie |
| Age 18+ United Kingdom | Facial age estimation, Document with selfie |
| Age 18+ Verified | Document with selfie |
| Age 18+ France | Facial age estimation, Document with selfie |
| Age 18+ Italy | Facial age estimation, Document with selfie |
| Age 18+ Brazil | Facial age estimation, Document with selfie |
| Age 18+ Australia | Facial age estimation, Document with selfie |
| Age 16+ Australia | Facial age estimation, Document with selfie |
| Age 21+ Verified | Document with selfie |
A note on age assurance and compliance
Age assurance requirements vary by jurisdiction and use case. While Persona’s claim types are informed by regulatory guidance, standards, and industry best practices, your organization is responsible for determining how to implement age verification in a way that meets applicable laws and requirements. You should evaluate your use of Relay as part of your broader compliance strategy. Relay is built to be a useful part of that larger process rather than the whole of it. It gives you an assurance signal at the point of access, while the surrounding policy, record keeping, and enforcement decisions stay with you.