KYX: designing identity verification by API

KYX is a Xearth product: identity verification (KYC) infrastructure available through an API, which speeds up user onboarding without giving up trust. It was born from a need met in almost all our fintech and mobility projects: verifying quickly, and properly, who is signing up.

The context

Every application that handles money or connects people must verify identities. Redoing that work project after project was expensive and produced uneven results. We decided to make it a product in its own right, with one requirement: an answer in under a second, readable by a machine and explainable to a human.

What we built

• Data extraction from identity documents by character recognition, with detection of forged documents.
• Face verification, which compares the selfie with the document, and liveness detection, passive and active.
• Fraud detection from behavior and digital signals, and detection of manipulated or generated images.
• Compliance checks: sanctions lists, politically exposed persons, anti-money-laundering.
• Object verification, for inventory and presence use cases.
• A REST API, typed SDKs and documentation that allow a three-step integration: integrate, verify, decide.

How we worked

By treating KYX as a product, not as a project: a roadmap, representative test sets, accuracy and response-time measurements at every release. Models are evaluated on documents from many countries and decisions come with detailed reasons, so that the client's compliance team stays in control.

Technologies

Vision and biometric models, an inference pipeline optimized for latency, REST API and SDKs, administration dashboard. Part of the work belongs to our R&D on on-device AI.

What we take away

A good identity product returns a clear decision and explains it. That is what lets fintechs, marketplaces and ride-hailing apps adopt it in a few days. KYX is available at kyx.ci and powers our AI assistants and agents whenever a verification is needed.