The identity check

You photograph a government issued identity document, usually a passport or a driving licence, and then your own face. The provider reads the document, checks it is genuine, and checks the face in front of the camera is a live person matching the document rather than a photograph of one.

It runs with a specialist provider rather than inside snapdue. Identity verification is a narrow, adversarial field and buying that answer from a specialist is better than building a worse version of it.

snapdue records the outcome of the check, the verified name, and whether that name appears among the officers of the company. It does not use that name match to grant anything, for the reasons in the article on claiming your company.

Identity records sit under money laundering rules rather than under ordinary account data. That means they are kept for five years after the business relationship ends, they never appear in anything shown to a buyer, and a request to delete your account does not remove them, because the law requires them to be kept.

You can read exactly what is kept and why on the account page, which lists it before you ask for anything to be deleted.

Under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023, Companies House verifies the identity of directors and people with significant control, and it publishes the outcome per officer.

snapdue reads that and shows it on the company. An officer with a verification start date and no end date has been checked by the registrar. An officer carrying a statement due date has not, and that date is a statutory deadline rather than a suggestion.

It raises the floor and it does not close the question. It says the registrar has checked that a person of that name exists. It does not connect the person sitting in front of snapdue to that record, which is a job snapdue has to do for itself.