Onfido

What is Onfido?

Onfido is a global identity verification platform founded in 2012 in London, now owned by Entrust (acquired 2023). It verifies identity documents from 195 countries — passports, national IDs, driving licences, residence permits — combined with biometric face matching and liveness detection. The platform is built around an AI-powered document reading engine and a global fraud detection model trained on hundreds of millions of verification attempts.

Onfido's product has two main components: Smart Capture SDK (a mobile and web UI for capturing document photos and selfies with guided real-time feedback) and Atlas AI (the backend model that reads the document, verifies it against known authentic templates for that country, checks security features, and matches the face to the document photo). The result is a structured JSON response with confidence scores and a pass/fail decision that your product uses to gate access or trigger a manual review.

For Indian product managers, the critical context is understanding where Onfido fits in the Indian market. Onfido supports Indian documents — Aadhaar, PAN, passport, driving licence — but does not have direct API access to India's government verification databases (UIDAI for Aadhaar OTP verification, ITD for PAN). Indian vendors like HyperVerge and IDfy have these direct integrations, which provide authoritative document authenticity verification, not just visual document reading. Onfido performs visual and AI-based document analysis without the database verification step that Indian regulators and many Indian compliance teams require for full-KYC purposes.

When Onfido Is — and Is Not — the Right Choice for Indian Teams

Key Features

Onfido vs Indian KYC Vendors

Best For

• Indian fintechs expanding to Southeast Asia, Middle East, or Africa needing one global KYC vendor
• Indian startups serving NRI and diaspora users with foreign passports and IDs alongside Indian documents
• B2B SaaS companies with global enterprise customers requiring international employee verification
• Indian crypto exchanges needing global KYC for international user compliance
• Teams wanting self-serve onboarding and no-code workflow management for their KYC flow

Pricing

Pros and Cons

Alternatives to Onfido

Getting Started with Onfido

1. Use Onfido Studio to define your workflow before writing any integration code — Onfido Studio's no-code workflow builder lets you define your entire verification journey — which documents to accept, in which order, what checks to run, when to trigger a face match, and what happens on failure — without any code. Build and validate your workflow in Studio first. This serves two purposes: your compliance team can review and approve the workflow visually without reading API specs, and the Studio configuration exports a workflow ID that drives your SDK integration without hardcoding verification logic. When your KYC policy changes, updating Studio updates the workflow for all users without a code deployment.
2. For Indian users, confirm whether visual verification meets your regulatory requirements — Before integrating Onfido for Indian users, consult your compliance team on whether Onfido's visual document verification (AI-based reading and fraud detection without UIDAI database access) meets your regulatory KYC requirements. For RBI-regulated NBFCs and banks, the answer is typically no — full-KYC requires Aadhaar OTP verification against UIDAI. For unregulated products or products where V-CIP is optional, Onfido's document reading may be sufficient. This regulatory clarity prevents building an Onfido integration only to discover it does not satisfy your compliance requirements three months later.
3. Handle the capture quality failure gracefully — Indian mobile conditions are challenging — Onfido's Smart Capture SDK provides real-time feedback to users while capturing document photos — "Too much glare," "Move closer," "Hold steady." But Indian real-world conditions (cheap Android devices, poor indoor lighting, laminated documents that reflect light heavily) produce higher capture failure rates than in Onfido's global averages. Build retry logic, clear user instructions for each failure reason, and a fallback path to manual upload for users whose capture fails 2-3 times. Test your capture flow on a range of mid-range Android devices — the Rs 8,000-15,000 category dominant in India — not just on iPhones. What works on premium hardware often fails on the devices your actual users have.
4. Map each country's specific document requirements before going live in that market — Onfido supports 2,500+ document types but not all checks apply to all countries. Singapore's MyInfo integration works differently from UAE's Emirates ID verification, which works differently from Indian PAN verification. Before expanding to a new country, use Onfido's documentation to map which document types are accepted, which security checks apply, and whether your target country requires specific regulatory compliance add-ons. Build and test this mapping before announcing your expansion — international KYC edge cases (expired documents, non-standard name formats, birth certificates as identity in some markets) will surface as support tickets on day one if not handled in advance.
5. Run a parallel comparison with Indian KYC vendors before committing Onfido for India users — If you are considering Onfido for Indian users alongside international users, run a structured comparison: integrate both Onfido and HyperVerge (or IDfy) in your staging environment, run 50-100 real test verifications with Indian documents and Indian users through both, and compare pass rates, processing time, and cost. In most cases you will find Indian vendors outperform Onfido on Indian documents by a meaningful margin. The right architecture for most Indian companies expanding globally is Indian vendor (HyperVerge/IDfy) as primary for Indian users and Onfido as secondary for international users — two integrations with clear routing logic, not a single Onfido integration for everyone.