Integration Guide: Government ID Verification via API

Enterprise support

This feature is restricted to customers on the Enterprise plan. Please reach out to your Account Team or contact us if you are interested in enabling and setting up this feature.

Solution overview

Silently orchestrates a Government ID verification on an individual

Pre-integration

Ensure you have the proper consent language in place to be able to support Government ID via API verification
Make sure your organization is set up with the requisite transaction and workflows!
Review the verification requirements
Think about any additional post-verification business logic you want to apply to your users in the Persona Workflow (report runs, age checks, etc)
Think about if there are any situations that would warrant a manual review of the user, using Persona Cases.

Reach out to your Persona team if you have questions related to any of these items!

Integration Steps

1. Create the Transaction

Please ensure you’re including the reference_id property under the attributes object: this will be the value you use to identify the user’s Persona account
Use your Production API key to create Production transactions, and your Sandbox API key to create Sandbox transactions

Transaction fields

The minimum set of fields required for the verification is: id_front_photo, id_class, address_country_code, and transaction_type.

Whether or not additional fields are required will depend on your checks configuration. For example, if you’re requiring the Inquiry Comparison check, you will want to prefill the inquiry with the user’s information, so Persona can verify that it matches what’s on the ID.

Field	Type	Required?	Description
name_first	String	false	First Name
name_last	String	false	Last name
name_middle	String	false	Middle name
birthdate	Date	false	Birthdate, in the format of `YYYY-MM-DD`
address_street_1	String	false	Address street 1
address_street_2	String	false	Address street 2
address_city	String	false	Address city
address_postal_code	String	false	Address postal code
address_subdivision	String	false	Address subdivision (state). Abides by ISO 3166-2 standards.
address_country_code	String	true	2-letter country code. See Persona’s list of supported countries in your dashboard.
id_class	String	true	Map the ID type to the Persona Identifier (docs)
id_front_photo	File	true	The front photo of the ID
id_back_photo	File	false	The back photo of the ID— only required if your verification configuration requires it
phone_number	String	false	Phone number
email_address	String	false	Email address
transaction_type	String	true	ID referencing a Transaction type.
debug	String	false	For Sandbox verifications only: set as `passed` to pass the verification or `failed` to force-fail the verification. By default, the verification will pass.

Sample cURL commands

Because your request will contain files we recommend using a multipart/form-data style of request over application/json, though we have provided both as examples.

We’ve omitted some of the optional fields here for simplicity.

1 curl -X POST https://api.withpersona.com/api/v1/transactions \
2 -H 'Authorization: Bearer <api_token>' \
3 --form 'data[attributes][transaction_type_id]=<your transaction id>' \
4 --form 'data[attributes][reference_id]=<your internal identifier for the user>' \
5 --form 'data[attributes][fields][name_first]=Persona' \
6 --form 'data[attributes][fields][name_last]=Test' \
7 --form 'data[attributes][fields][birthdate]=1990-01-01' \
8 --form 'data[attributes][fields][id_class]=dl' \
9 --form 'data[attributes][fields][address_country_code]=US' \
10 --form 'data[attributes][fields][id_front_photo]=@path-to-front-file.png' \
11 --form 'data[attributes][fields][id_back_photo]=@path-to-back-file.png' \
12 --form 'data[attributes][fields][debug]=passed'

2. Listen for the Transaction status

We recommend listening to the transaction.status-updated webhook (docs) to know when to proceed. You can alternatively make an API call to fetch the transaction (docs).

Transaction statuses

To view and edit these statuses, click “… > Custom Statuses” on your transaction type’s page

Status name	Description
`created`	Transaction has been created.
`approved`	Transaction has been approved: you can proceed with the user.
`declined`	Transaction has been declined: verification unsuccessful or user otherwise declined.
`needs_review`	Transaction is awaiting manual review.
`errored`	Transaction has errored.

Fallback inquiry orchestration

If your transaction flow includes a fallback to a Persona UI inquiry, you’ll utilize the following additional fields and statuses.

Additional fields

Field	Type	Description
`fallback_inquiry_id`	String	Persona will create and populate this field with the inquiry ID for you to surface to your user.

Additional statuses

Status name	Description
`pending_fallback_inquiry`	The transaction will reach this status if a fallback inquiry has been created. On receipt of this status update, you will know that `fallback_inquiry_id` has been populated and your next action will be to surface that inquiry.