FAQ

We currently have a 98% EMEA document scanning coverage with passport verification in 85 countries. Check our Verification Supported Countries page for a full breakdown of supported countries and core capabilities.

We support a total of 98 languages including English, Arabic, and Latin.

Know Your Customer (KYC) is an identity verification process that authenticates the real identity of customers during onboarding.

EDD goes beyond CDD and looks to establish a higher level of identity assurance with additional verification steps such as verifying the customer’s address.

Three key steps are involved in our identity process; first, we read the document and extract identity data; next, we check the person on camera is real and matches the document; finally, we verify document authenticity via government databases or using the digital signatures on the document.

KYC document requirements vary according to a region’s jurisdiction but generally include

• A government-issued ID card
• Passport
• Driving License
• Voter’s ID
• Birth certificates

KYC helps financial institutions verify the identity of customers and prevents companies from being used in illegal financial activities. KYC also helps firms understand their customer’s financial behaviour, aiding in a better user experience.

eKYC or Digital KYC refers to a remote, paperless KYC process, that can be completed digitally. The steps involved in eKYC are:

• AI document scanning
• Biometric face recognition
• Digital document verification

uqudo’s identity verification can be completed in less than 10 seconds.

uqudo’s screening process involves running background checks by checking global lists for high-risk entities. In regulated industries, there is a requirement to ensure the individuals you are dealing with aren’t sanctioned to mitigate business risk.

1. Anti Money Laundering (AML) is a set of policies, procedures, and technologies that prevents money laundering. Money laundering involves the execution of transactions to eventually convert illegally obtained money into legal money.
2. A Politically Exposed Person (PEP) check, also known as PEP sanction screening, involves searching official politically exposed people lists to see if a prospective or current customer is on that list during client identification or transaction screening processes.
3. Sanctions checks (sometimes known as watchlist checks) are specialised searches that include several international, government, or regulator sanctions databases that identify individuals prohibited from certain activities or industries.

Our Screening lists include the following:

1. Monitored Lists: 900+ monitored lists that include international sanctions, money laundering and other global lists.
2. PEPs (Politically Exposed Person) lists: PEP list check against 1.7+ million high-risk individuals.
3. Adverse Media Screening: Screening against 3 billion media articles.

We can screen and monitor in real-time, on an ongoing basis.

AML (Anti-Money Laundering) refers to the rules and regulations that combat money laundering and terrorist financing. AML screening helps detect and identify these suspicious activities.

Monitored lists use data from numerous sources to evaluate a customer’s risk profile. Some examples of monitored lists include

• International sanction lists (FATF, OFAC, UNSC)
• Regional sanction lists (MENAFATF, EU, GIABA, ESAAMLG)
• Money laundering 
• Terrorist financing
• Drug trafficking
• Narcotics trafficking 
• Human rights violations
• International treaties violations

PEPs (Politically Exposed Persons) are those individuals holding a prominent public position, which increases their susceptibility to fraud. PEP screening involves identifying PEPs and evaluating their risk profiles. 

Our PEP screening involves evaluation against 4 PEPs risk levels, which are:

1. High-risk PEPs
2. Medium-risk PEPs
3. Low-risk PEPs
4. PEPs by association

A global watchlist screening helps companies identify suspicious money launderers and individuals associated with financial crimes. Along with this, screening helps firms comply with their region’s AML/CFT regulations.

Yes, our database undergoes real-time updates, so our Ongoing AML can easily track changes in a customer’s risk profile.

Know Your Business (KYB) refers to the controls that a company must implement to ensure its clients are not engaged in criminal activity. It is the process of due diligence that should be undertaken before dealing with any organisation.

KYC (Know Your Customer) refers to verifying the identity of an individual, whereas KYB (Know Your Business) analyses and verifies the identity of companies.

KYB helps companies obtain essential information about their potential clients, to protect their interests while dealing with other businesses. It also ensures that organisations are not indirectly associated with fraudulent activities.

The main advantages of a comprehensive KYB Screening procedure are:

1. Helps evaluate the business authenticities of companies, and identify changes in transactional behavior, which sometimes indicate fraud.
2. Identifies the Ultimate Beneficial Owner (UBO) and evaluates their risk profiles.
3. Screening key stakeholders prevent the occurrence of financial fraud making companies trustworthy.

A UBO (Ultimate Beneficial Owner) is the ultimate business owner of an organisation. A UBO can be classified as someone 

• who owns more than 25% of the company’s shares.
• who controls more than 25% of the voting rights.
• who is a beneficiary of at least 25% of the organisation’s capital.
• who is a shareholder, including those with bearer shares that can be transferred anonymously.

Yes, uqudo’s KYB coverage includes more than 98 languages, including Arabic, English, Afrikaans and many more.

Every individual is unique. As technology progresses, we can use aspects of uniqueness to authenticate a person’s identity. Everything from the face, fingerprint, palm, and voice can be used to verify a person is who they say they are. Given most ID documents are photo IDs, the face is the most common and popular way to authenticate with biometrics.

Biometric authentication provides the opportunity for passwordless logins for your users. Logging in with the face is both faster and more secure. Strong authentication refers to the set of specifications laid out by FIDO. These specifications mean authentication is intrinsically stringent enough to ensure the security of the system it protects.

Biometric face authentication uses unique facial patterns to identify people, making it highly efficient. Since our platform doesn’t store data, all biometric information is encrypted and secure.

Uqudo lets your customers use the following biometrics for authentication:

• Face
• Fingerprint
• Voice
• Iris
• Palm

Our two-factor authentication (2FA) uses facial biometrics as the second factor to provide a non-invasive second layer of authentication, to keep your customer data secure.

uqudo’s AI Document Scanning can read and extract identity data from 98% of commonly used identity documents in EMEA. Check out our Coverage & Capabilities for a full breakdown of supported documents filtered by geography.

We can read all passports with an NFC chip and verify passports in 86 countries. In addition to this, we are able to verify identity cards in a total of 11 countries currently. For a full list of the documents that we are able to verify visit our Coverage & Capabilities page.

uqudo’s SDK is supported on both iOS (version 9.0 and above) and Android (version 6.0 and above). The NFC feature requires a phone with an NFC interface.

We support active and passive authentication.

• Passive authentication is aimed at identifying modification of passport chip data. The chip contains a file that stores hash values of all files stored in the chip (attributes, face image, etc.) and a digital signature of these hashes. We have the public certificates in our backend. 
• Active Authentication prevents the cloning of passport chips. The chip contains a private key that cannot be read or copied. Our backend creates a random value, sends it to the chip for signing and verifies the signature. In that way, we are sure the original card is present at the time of onboarding.

There are 2 options which can be configured when initializing the SDK:

• Option 1: The user gets a notification that the document is expired. The SDK only continues with a document that is not expired.
• Option 2: The user can onboard the expired document. Your app or your backend can check in the expiry date is in the past.

uqudo’s platform extracts identity data as per a country’s regulatory requirements. For additional customisation, get in touch with our team.

uqudo is a fully customisable white-label solution that integrates seamlessly within your website and application via SDK.

uqudo integration is simple and can be completed in a matter of days. We provide documentation and ongoing support to help you get up and running as fast as possible.

Reach out to us via our contact page or book a demo.

Yes. Our solution can be SaaS or on-premise deployment.

Yes. You can access a sandbox account to test the product and its integrations.

Uqudo can provide an API that supports the following features:

• Convert pictures of IDs into machine-encoded text (OCR).
• Perform validations (e.g. verification of checksums, matching ID data with the MRZ).
• Access to 3rd party databases for KYC/AML checks.

However, there are many features that require the uqudo SDK:

• Animated instructions and help pages to guide users through the onboarding process.
• Ensure the phone is in a secure state (e.g. phone is not rooted).
• Automatic scanning of IDs (without a shutter button).
• Assurance that the picture can be processed by our OCR engine (e.g. avoid blurring, reflections).
• Reading NFC chips embedded inside IDs.
• Passive authentication by verifying digital signatures.
• Active authentication to ensure the ID was present at the time of onboarding.
• Taking a selfie for face authentication automatically (without a shutter button).
• Assurance that the lighting conditions and the quality of the selfie are sufficient for face authentication.
• Matching between the face image extracted from the ID with the selfie.
• Liveness detection during face authentication.

Yes. Our global screening capabilities provide the answers you need to meet your compliance requirements.

No, we do not. Your privacy is our number one priority.

By default, we do not store previously completed and stored verifications. However, if required, you can opt-in that we store this information at an additional cost.

Only you have access to your data.

Our pricing model is success based, which means 

• You only pay for customers you have successfully onboarded onto your platform. 
• There’s no charge for unsuccessful attempt requests.
• There’s no charge for additional documents.

uqudo’s pricing model reduces your average cost per user onboarding, letting you control your acquisition costs.

Our pricing is fully customisable, according to your requirements. We also offer discounted rates, with more significant discounts for larger verification counts. 

Some features that can be customised according to your verification requirements include;

1. KYC 
   1. OCR and NFC
   2. OCR, NFC and Biomterics
   3. Document verification via data integrations (varies according to your country)
2. Screening
   1. PEPs and Sanctions (Screening and/or Monitoring)
   2. PEPs and Sanctions + Adverse Media Screening (Screening and/or Monitoring)
3. KYB

The pricing of our KYB verifications varies according to your requirements, with discounted prices for larger numbers.

Along with this, we also have options for data storage and enhanced security.

Our pricing is specific to the geography and capabilities you require. To learn more about our pricing Book a free demo

uqudo is an award-winning company revolutionising the identity space in the Middle East & Africa. We’re a team of innovators, technologists, and identity veterans passionate about creating an identity layer that raises the bar in terms of customer experience, connectivity, and compliance. 

uqudo is headquartered in Dubai, UAE, with offices in Manchester, Riyadh and Bangkok. Contact us to get in touch.

We’ve been in the identity space for 8 years. Our team comprises industry experts with combined 100 years of experience in the identity space. We started as an identity consultancy company delivering complex and large-scale projects. In the last two years, we have shifted gears to productise our solution to create a superior identity layer for MEA.

We have an 8-year track record of delivering identity excellence across five sectors. Some of our clients include:

• Fintech: Tabby, SyberPay
• Banks: Bank of Kigali
• Telco: Du
• Government: Regional National ID programme

And many more who we are not able to disclose.

Check out our Client & Partner pages to learn more.

We’re always here to help. You can reach out to us here.

For more information on our products and features, you can contact our product specialists here.

We have a dedicated account management team that will be happy to guide you throughout your customer journey with us. 

Check out our Blog to stay up to date with everything identity.

You will receive an email from us at 50%, 80%, and 90% consumption to ensure there is no disruption to your services. 

You can choose to upgrade your plan anytime by contacting h.omer@uqu.do

Get in touch with h.omer@uqu.do for anything related to your package.

Contact h.omer@uqu.do and let us know of any changes to your company so we can ensure there are no disturbances to your package.

For technical support, get in touch with support@uqu.do. 

Email all your finance queries to accounts@uqu.do, and they will get back to you in a timely manner.