Why Scandit Automated ID Verification Is the Smarter Choice for Fast, Secure Identity Checks

Across industries, manual ID checks are reaching their limits. Airlines, banks, age-restricted delivery services, and other businesses face pressure to verify customer identities more quickly and accurately without increasing fraud risk or regulatory exposure.

Automated ID verification solves these problems by eliminating the manual steps that slow down employees and reducing the friction for each customer identity check.

But automation comes in many forms. Choosing the right identity verification solution depends on how much control you want, how quickly you need to deploy, and what level of assurance your workflow demands.

You don’t always need a hardware reader or a full IDV platform to solve the problem. Many businesses simply need a fast, accurate, and secure way to capture and validate IDs within the apps they already use on their devices.

A complex or budget-breaking answer isn’t always needed to achieve enterprise-grade results. This blog explains the business reasons for deploying lightweight, flexible, customizable identity verification solutions such as SDKs and turnkey apps.

What are the five types of automated ID verification solutions?

The following is a summary of our full comparison between automated ID verification solutions:

Turnkey app: A ready-to-use mobile or web app with built-in ID scanning. It’s fast to deploy but limited in customization.

1. Turnkey app: A ready-to-use mobile or web app with built-in ID scanning. It’s fast to deploy but limited in customization.
2. SDK: A developer toolkit that embeds ID capture and validation directly into your existing app or web service.
3. Hardware reader: Dedicated desktop or kiosk devices offering very high assurance but at high cost and low mobility.
4. Biometric point solution: Uses facial, iris, or fingerprint recognition to confirm identity ownership; highly secure but slower and often more than business requirements dictate.
5. IDV platform: Cloud-based systems combining document, biometric, and database checks into a full-service workflow, often with added latency, complexity, and cost.

Each solution serves a purpose, but they’re not all built for speed-sensitive or consumer-facing environments.

That’s where solutions like Scandit’s can better meet real-world business needs. Options include a fully customizable ID scanning SDK, the turnkey Scandit Express app, and ID Bolt — a simplified, superlight, easily customizable version of an IDV platform that scans IDs on users’ devices without transmitting PII to backend services, and with a strong focus on user experience.

The most important features for an ID scanner

1. Real-world speed and user experience

In high-throughput, customer-facing environments, such as online check-in, retail stores, and age-restricted deliveries, every second impacts queue length and customer happiness. Compliant but slow ID verification technology drives abandonment and staff frustration, and ultimately leads to revenue losses.

If your employees work in areas with limited to no internet access, you also need an ID scanner that works offline.

How does Scandit deliver real-world speed and a better user experience?

Scandit software uses highly optimized video-stream-based capture and on-device processing, enabling it to scan IDs in just one second. Able to capture critical information from a wide range of angles and environmental conditions, it fosters fast, first-time success for high-speed workflows where speed and customer experience are essential business metrics.

Internal tests show that, when compared to another leading identity verification SDK, Scandit scans documents 2x faster for MRZ and VIZ, and over 3.5X faster for PDF417 barcodes. Scandit also provides full-screen document capture, rather than a small window, giving users the widest possible view to scan IDs at the angles they want.

One of the largest food delivery companies in the US uses Scandit’s fake ID detection capabilities to process more than 100,000 IDs a week, saving 180,000 hours of dwell time in proof-of-delivery workflows.

2. Identity document support and accuracy

Global businesses must verify many identity document types, such as passports, national IDs, driver’s licenses, and digital IDs. These vary in layout and security features. When a system fails to read an ID, it disrupts workflows, frustrates customers, and adds manual effort. For industries like air travel and car rental, accuracy is directly tied to compliance and throughput.

How accurate is Scandit’s ID verification and document support?

Scandit supports over 2,500 identity document types worldwide, including digital identity documents and mobile driver's licenses. The software also detects voided IDs (punched or clipped), helping businesses meet their assurance threshold without the hardware costs or latency burdens.

Compared to other identity verification SDKs, Scandit software achieves these industry-leading accuracy rates:

• 100% scan accuracy rate for IDs with PDF417 barcodes.
• 99% accuracy rate for IDs with Machine Readable Zones (MRZ).
• 95% accuracy rate for Visual Inspection Zones (VIZ), with 100% accuracy for the date of birth field.
• 99% accuracy rate for authenticating IDs in real-world conditions and actual customer workflows.

3. Required assurance level

Required assurance levels vary across workflows — a passport gate at customs demands a more rigorous verification than at an airline counter. The best identity verification solution isn’t necessarily the one that verifies the greatest number of features. Instead, it’s the tool that offers enough verification strength for the specific use case while also meeting efficiency and budget requirements.

What level of assurance does Scandit’s ID verification solution provide?

Scandit provides real-time document validation and fake ID detection, ideal for travel, car rental, delivery, and onboarding use cases. It’s designed for fast, customer-centric verification that delivers sufficient assurance while preserving the frictionless experience that keeps operations moving.

A leading European airline deployed Scandit’s lightweight, low-code web solution for identity verification, ID Bolt, into its online check-in workflow — scanning over 200,000 passports and identity cards per month with a 5x increase in completion rates compared to their previous solution.

4. Security and data privacy: on-device vs. cloud processing

Identity document data is personal data, and any external data transmission increases risk. For GDPR, CCPA, and emerging data sovereignty laws, the location of data processing, transmission, and storage determines your compliance exposure.

Solutions that minimize data transfer and encrypt all communications boost your team's confidence in meeting compliance requirements and maintaining customer trust.

How does Scandit protect data security and privacy?

Scandit processes all captured data on device, meaning images and extracted information never leave the user’s smartphone, tablet, or handheld computer unless your app explicitly transmits them. This processing model also improves performance, as there is no round-trip latency incurred for transmitting data to the cloud.

Scandit software is ISO 27001 certified and stays up to date with regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.

5. Flexibility and customization

No two enterprises are the same, yet every enterprise wants to get the most out of its identity verification solution. That could mean supporting a specific combination of device, operating system, and programming language, or feature customization that best fits the business need.

An identity verification SDK is a toolkit allowing you to pick, deploy, and customize the features you want on the development stack you have. In contrast, an IDV platform makes most of the choices for you, forcing you to adapt to a solution that doesn't necessarily meet your needs.

How flexible is Scandit software for enterprise environments?

Scandit software supports the customization of a wide range of ID scanning and verification features, user experience, and performance optimizations for native iOS, native Android, and web apps. It supports all major development stacks, as well as a wide range of devices including laptops, smartphones, tablets, and handheld computers.

Learn more about Scandit’s ID verification solutions

Scandit offers flexibility in choosing the ID verification features you want and the deployment models to bring them to life. The ID Scanning SDK supports full customization and integration into both mobile apps and websites. It’s also the highly optimized and feature-rich foundation for faster deployment options:

• ID Bolt: operates like a simplified and lightweight IDV platform. It lets your website visitors use their devices to scan IDs with a helpful user experience, without collecting personal data (PII) or relying on backend services — ideal for B2C websites and lower-assurance use cases such as online check-in on an airline website or age verification when selling restricted goods. The look and feel of the UI is customizable to fit your brand identity.
• Scandit Express app: our turnkey app that adds ID scanning and fake ID detection to existing native and web applications on mobile devices without requiring any code changes — ideal for situations where your applications are hard to modify, or require development resources you don’t have available.

With over a decade of experience and proven accuracy, Scandit helps enterprises scale identity verification across any device and workflow. From free trials to enterprise-level support, our trusted data capture expertise guides businesses of every size through evaluation, integration and rollout to everyday operations.