Skip to main content
All CollectionsSupport for Law Firm UsersLegl KYC & AML
How are overseas clients identities verified?
How are overseas clients identities verified?

Identity verification checks and overseas clients

Tess avatar
Written by Tess
Updated over 2 months ago

In this article we will cover:

Can overseas clients have their identities verified through Legl?

Our Engage tools are built with technology that runs global due diligence checks, so you can onboard clients anywhere in the world. Our ID document verification is able to verify a government-issued photo ID document from any country, however, there are some jurisdictions that have insufficient datasets for us to be able to reliably verify the individual's address. In these instances, we will be unable to provide a clear result for this section of the Engage report as no matches will have been found. In these cases, workflows automatically capture a valid proof of address document if your client has provided an address outside of the UK.

The following countries have centralised datasets that are sufficient for us to automatically match the individual's name, address and date of birth they have entered with the sources below to verify their details. We collect additional documents for all countries outside of the UK (including those in the list below) to ensure there are never situations where you need to send a second Engage request to a client.

  • Australia

  • Austria

  • Denmark

  • Italy

  • Switzerland

  • Germany

  • Norway

  • Spain

  • Sweden

  • United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (the)

  • United States of America (the)

If you would like to collect an additional document from clients in all countries (including the UK) then you can set this up in your workflows by selecting your workflow, editing the ‘Standard CDD’/‘Basic CDD’ step, and turning this toggle on:

How does Legl verify addresses?

We leverage different sources depending on the applicant country address. Below you can find the list of sources and their respective definitions.

  • Credit Agencies - Data comprised of consumer credit applications

  • Voting Register - Data comprised of voter registration within a country

  • Telephone Database - Data provided by both landline and mobile providers

  • Government - Any standard publicly accessible data collected by government entities. These include driver’s license data, motor vehicle registration, court filings, property ownership registers, permanent place of residence registration and other similar datasets

  • Business Registration - Data comprised of business registrations, corporate directors filings and business hierarchy data

  • Consumer Database - Opt-in consumer data leveraging database marketing and other similar opt-in data sources

  • Utility Registration - Data comprised of utility registrations such as electricity, gas, water accounts

  • Postal Authorities - Data provided by postal authorities

  • Commercial Database - These are corporate/private databases where users have opted-in and allowed for their information to be used for the purpose of verification of their identities

  • Proprietary - This is when a data provider chooses not to divulge the source of the data to us for varied reasons, and also includes social media-based data

  • Register of Deaths - Negative source for known deaths (the UK only)

If you have any questions please don't hesitate to contact us at [email protected].

Did this answer your question?