Inscribe's verification feature can tell you whether a document contains a given piece of information or not. The currently supported pieces of information are names, addresses, ID numbers, and arbitrary strings. This article will help you understand verification, and show how it can accelerate your customer approval process while improving security.
Uploading
To verify that a name, address, ID number or string appears on a document, simply supply these details when uploading the relevant document(s) to Inscribe with the Upload Document(s) endpoint.
If you do not have the required details and instead want to automatically extract them, check out our Parsing feature.
Getting the results
Verified details are returned in the Get Document Results API response, under the 'verification' key. For each submitted detail, the verification response will contain a 'verified' key indicating whether the detail appears in the given document, an 'input' key simply returning the requested detail, and a 'matched' key providing the match found in the document.
The name result
Name matching is case-insensitive, can adapt to common alternative orderings, can handle the presence or absence of some parts of the name, and can even deal with common name variants, such as 'Greg' and 'Gregory'. It also correctly handles alternative representations of the same letters, as shown in the example here:
{
'verified': true,
'input': 'CARL GAUSS'
'matched': 'Carl Friedrich Gauß'
} When you want to verify the name of an individual, use the 'name' key when uploading. When you want to verify the name of a company, use the 'company' key. Inscribe applies different matching rules for individual names and company names to ensure the best results.
The address result
Address matching identifies the real-world location of the provided address, and will only verify an address if the provided and matched address both refer to the same location. In addition to the verified, input and matched keys, the address result also contains a 'normalized' key which returns a normalized version of the key, where you'll find a normalized form of the address you provided.
{
'verified': true,
'input': '235 San Pedro Street, Apt #549, Los Angeles'
'matched': '235 SAN PEDRO ST APT 549 LOS ANGELES CA'
'normalized': '235 San Pedro St #549, Los Angeles CA 90012',
}
Getting the best performance
Inscribe's verification feature works best on high-quality documents. As a rule of thumb, if you find it difficult to make out the text in the document, so will we! Verifying details that contain non-Latin characters will work much better for True PDFs (i.e. documents with highlightable text) as otherwise there may be OCR errors.