Re-verification Cost

Re-verification cost is what it costs, per event, to confirm someone's identity for the second time, at a mandated refresh, at a new app, at any point after the first check already happened. It's a distinct line from Cost Per Verification specifically because almost every identity-verification vendor prices it identically to the first check: run the same document scan, the same liveness challenge, the same face match, charge the same flat fee, because the vendor has no way to know, or no product built to let the user prove, that this exact person already cleared an equivalent check somewhere else.

That repetition isn't optional for a regulated business. FATF Recommendation 10 requires ongoing customer due diligence, including keeping identification documents and information current, a periodic-refresh obligation nearly every national AML regime layers its own cadence onto. A fintech, bank, or wallet doesn't get to skip re-verification; it only gets to decide how expensive and how repetitive it is for a customer who has already been through the process before.

Where the number actually moves

A portable, independently verifiable credential changes what a re-verification event has to be. Instead of re-running the document scan and liveness check, a relying party can check a cryptographic signature against a credential the person already holds, assuming that party is willing to accept a credential it didn't issue itself (see Trust Registry for why that's a live, unresolved trust question, not a solved one). Where that acceptance happens, the marginal cost of the Nth check drops from "the cost of a full identity check" to "the cost of verifying a signature", a categorically smaller number, because it's checking cryptography, not re-running biometric capture.

Solidus's number, and its ceiling

Solidus's own draft pricing puts a reuse event at $0.05–$0.25, against its own $5.00 first-check price for the same KYC Level 2 tier (see Cost Per Verification) and against incumbents' flat $1.50–4.00 per-check rates that don't distinguish first checks from tenth ones. Run the arithmetic and it's a real, not rounded-up, crossover: Solidus's cumulative cost at $5.00 for the first check plus $0.05 per reuse event falls below a flat-rate incumbent's cumulative cost of $1.50 per check every time at roughly the 2.4th reuse event, in practice, somewhere around the person's third or fourth total identity check. See Total Cost of Ownership for the full worked comparison, including every caveat that number depends on. That crossover is the entire commercial argument for reuse, and it depends entirely on a second, unaffiliated relying party actually accepting a Solidus-issued credential in place of its own check, which, as the Issuer-Holder-Verifier triangle entry states plainly, has not happened yet with a real paying customer.

See also

Cost Per Verification is the flat, first-check number this entry deliberately moves past. Verification Reuse is the mechanism that makes a cheap re-check possible. Credential Reuse Rate is what would actually prove this crossover happens in practice, not just on paper. Total Cost of Ownership is where both numbers belong together.