This sits inside TrustVision's first layer, onboarding, and hands off to fraud prevention. See how all three layers fit in the full TrustVision overview.
In this piece. There is no single Philippine ID. A lender's applicants show up with a PhilSys card, an old UMID, a PRC license, a postal ID, or whatever they happen to have in their wallet, and each one is built differently. Philippine ID verification has to answer the same four questions for all of them: can we read it, is it genuine, is it the person in front of us, and is that person actually there. Here is how TrustVision does that in a single capture, and what changes from one ID to the next.
A rural bank in Iloilo opens its digital onboarding to new borrowers. On the first day, one applicant submits a PhilSys National ID. The next uses a UMID with a worn laminate from 2014. Another has only a PRC license, and another a postal ID photographed on a kitchen table under a yellow bulb.
None of these applicants is doing anything wrong. They are using the ID they have. But each card has a different layout, different security features and different fields, and an onboarding flow that only reads one or two of them well will decline good customers for the wrong reason.
That is the real problem behind Philippine ID verification. It is not checking one ID. It is checking whichever ID shows up, the same way, every time.
TrustVision asks four questions of every ID, in order, from the same ID photo and live face capture the customer submits once:
1. Can we read it? Image quality checks look for blur, glare, tilt, cropping, more than one card in frame, the wrong document, or a photocopy instead of the original. If the photo is the problem, the customer gets a retake prompt that says what to fix, not a silent decline.
2. What does it say? OCR reads the name, ID number, birth date and address, separates first, middle and last name, and pre-fills the application form. On a driver's license, it reads ID numbers at 99% accuracy.
3. Is it genuine? The ID is checked for more than 20 signs of tampering: fonts that don't match, uneven character spacing, a portrait swapped in, a template that doesn't match the issuing agency's, and dates or numbers that contradict the card's own rules. Where the issuing agency has a database available, the ID is also validated against its records.
4. Is it the person, and are they really there? The live face is matched against the photo on the ID, and a liveness check, certified to ISO 30107-3 Level 2, confirms a real person is present rather than a printed photo, a screen, or a replayed video.
All four run seamlessly within one customer flow. The customer photographs one ID and takes one face capture, and that is all they see.
The four questions stay the same. What it takes to answer them changes with the card.
• PhilSys National ID (PhilID and ePhilID). The country's foundational ID, and the one regulators want lenders to accept. BSP guidance requires supervised institutions to accept the PhilID, including the printed ePhilID, as proof of identity, subject to authentication. The PSA also lets relying parties authenticate the card's QR code through PhilSys Check.
• UMID. Still in millions of wallets, and often years old. Worn laminates and faded photos make image quality and face matching do more of the work. More on UMIDs below.
• Driver's license (LTO) and Philippine passport. Clear, structured fields that OCR reads with high accuracy, which is why many lenders treat them as a strong second ID.
• Postal and voter’s IDs. Often the only ID an older or rural applicant carries. Turning these away is how lenders lose exactly the customers financial inclusion is meant to reach.
When a client needs an ID that is not on the list, the model can be trained on roughly 2,000 samples of that ID.
There is no public website where a bank can type in a UMID number and confirm it is real. So in practice, banks verify a UMID the same way they verify any other ID during eKYC: by checking the card and the person holding it.
1. Read the card. OCR pulls the name, birth date and Common Reference Number (CRN) and checks them against what the customer typed in the application.
2. Check it hasn't been altered. The image is checked for edits, a swapped photo, or a screen held up to the camera.
3. Match the face and confirm liveness. The live face is compared with the photo printed on the UMID, and liveness confirms a real person is present.
4. Ask for a second ID when the risk calls for it. Many banks pair an older UMID with a PhilSys National ID.
One change worth planning for: SSS now issues the MySSS Card in place of the UMID, and UMID cards already issued remain valid. Lenders will see both for years, and their onboarding should read both.
It is ID verification: reading whichever Philippine ID a customer brings, confirming it hasn't been tampered with, and confirming the person holding it is the person on it.
It stops there on purpose. Checking whether that face has already applied under a different name belongs to fraud prevention. Using the same face to approve a transfer later belongs to transaction verification. And deciding whether the customer should get the loan belongs to your credit model.
Your customers will bring whatever ID they have. Philippine ID verification that only works on the newest card turns away the people who most need a lender to say yes. TrustVision reads them all, checks them the same way, and lets the right customers through.