Stripe rolls out a super-fast ID verification tool

Stripe is on a roll.

The payment platform that recently became Silicon Valley’s most valuable private company at a $95B valuation has a new product: Stripe Identity, which lets businesses verify users’ IDs in ~15 seconds.

But it’s not exactly new

Rob Daly, head of engineering for Stripe Identity, said via a release that “businesses have been asking us for an easy and fast way to verify identities online.”

Stripe Identity is essentially the same tool Stripe built to verify its own users.

Only now, businesses of any size can use it too: Stripe tested it with partners — including Discord and venue rental site Peerspace — and the tool has launched more widely in 30+ countries.

This rollout comes on the heels of Stripe Tax, a product to simplify global tax compliance that dropped earlier this month.

How it works

Businesses can incorporate Stripe Identity into an existing flow or send out a verification link:

• Customers take a photo of their government ID and a live selfie, which Stripe matches via machine learning.
• Businesses can also ask for other info, which Stripe checks against 3rd-party records.
• Customer info is encrypted and sent to Stripe, so businesses don’t have to store or manage it themselves.

But even businesses that don’t take payments need to verify user IDs, such as to prevent spammy bots… which means the real benefit of Stripe Identity is that you don’t have to “select all the squares with crosswalks in them.”