KYC (Know Your Customer)

KYC, "Know Your Customer", is the process a regulated business runs to confirm who it's dealing with before opening an account or providing a service: collecting a government-issued ID, checking it isn't forged, and confirming the person presenting it is the person the document names (not a photo of someone else's ID). It exists because financial crime regulators require it, not because it's a nice-to-have.

A typical KYC check has three legs: document verification (is the ID document genuine and internally consistent, correct security features, matching data fields), identity verification (does the live person match the document's photo, usually via a liveness check plus a face-match), and, in some jurisdictions, a check against government identity systems or watchlists. What KYC produces, at the end, is normally just an internal record: "we checked this person on this date." The next company the same person deals with has to run the whole check again from zero, which is precisely the gap Credential Portability (the wedge below) is aimed at.

Who actually built this

KYC is regulator-defined, not company-invented. The US Bank Secrecy Act (1970) is the foundational law; the Financial Action Task Force, an intergovernmental body founded in 1989, turned it into a global standard through its 40 Recommendations, which nearly every country's regulator maps its own rules to. The EU layers its Anti-Money Laundering Directives on top; Türkiye's telecom sector runs its own remote-identification rules through BTK, and its financial sector through MASAK. None of this is Solidus's design, Solidus builds a pipeline that satisfies it.

Solidus today

Solidus Verify runs its own native KYC pipeline, document capture and MRZ/OCR extraction, an active-challenge liveness gate, and face matching, rather than routing checks through a third-party identity-verification vendor. Document capture and face matching are live and answer on the public internet today; the active-challenge liveness gate has been built and tested end-to-end but has not been confirmed running in a live production session (see Liveness Detection), treat it as testnet, pre-production work, not a standing guarantee. The pipeline overall is, honestly, testnet-grade: unaudited, uncertified, and not yet gated for the transaction-monitoring and sanctions-screening side of compliance (AML), which Solidus has deliberately not built yet.

See also

IDV is the broader technical umbrella KYC sits inside. AML is the part of compliance KYC alone doesn't cover. Liveness Detection and Presentation Attack are the two techniques that make the "is this a real, present person" leg of KYC honest. Credential Portability is what happens to the result of a KYC check after it's done.