About Signicat’s implementation of Arvato Digital Identity Check

Arvato, a division of Bertelsmann based in Germany, offers information technology-services and risk management solutions. Their Risk Management System offers checks to see if a client is fraudulent and solvent by aggregating several internal and external services via a decision engine. This includes identity and address validation, solvency records and fraud checks (among others).

Signicat supports address validation through Arvato’s Digital Identity Check (DIC). This service makes it possible to check if the requested person can be identified at the specified address. Signicat’s implementation of the service requires the customer to provide a first and last name, and a valid address consisting of a street, zip-code, city, and country (only German addresses are supported by Arvato). The result of the address verification is returned as a predefined letter code.

Use cases

DIC is useful in many scenarios, for example when onboarding new customers, verifying identities and/or checking people against AML regulations (Anti Money Laundering).

Digital onboarding of a new customer

A customer wants to open a new bank account online. The bank (merchant) wants to check if the name and address match by using DIC.

1. The customer uploads the identity papers.
2. The merchant presents a registration form to the customer and the customer fills in name and address a.o.
3. The input data is sent via Signicat to the Arvato DIC service to check if the name and address match.
4. The service sends back a response to the merchant with a letter code indicating if the name and address are matched or not.

Checking a customer against fraud

A merchant wants to check if the address of a customer is valid before billing the customer. In this case, the merchant already has some customer data but wants to run an additional check using DIC to match the name and address.

1. The merchant sends existing customer data via Signicat to the Arvato DIC service to check if the name and address match.
2. The service sends back a response to the merchant with a letter code indicating if the name and address are matched or not.

How to integrate via Signicat

Integration with the service is done via the same API as Signicat’s ID methods. See Get started with authentication for more information. Through the single point of integration, you will get access to Signicat’s wide portfolio of integrated ID methods and other services like identity paper verification, lookups, and video assurance.

Data flow

This is the basic data flow when using DIC to verify a person’s address:

How to set up the Digital Identity Check service

This section describes how to interact with the Arvato DIC service through Signicat’s API. Signicat’s Arvato service supports JSON for accessing the API.

Authentication

All requests must be authenticated by means of an OIDC access token, supplied as an Authorization header of the Bearer type. For information on how to obtain such a token, see Accessing Signicat REST services.

API

HTTP headers

You must set the Accept HTTP header (receiving content type) to application/json.

How to use the Digital Identity Check service

Digital Identity Check performs address validation for the supplied person to the given address.

Request

DigitalIdentityCheckRequest

Person

Address

Response

PersonResponse

IdentityResponses

DICResp

DigitalIdentityCheck

Understanding results

Valid request: Code 200

The request was valid and resulted in a response message.

Explanation of the feature codes in the response:

Invalid request: Code 400

Code 400 means the request is invalid. In this case, the response body will provide more information. Here is an example of what the response will look like when the “firstname” property is missing and the format of “zipcode” is wrong in the request:

{   
    "instance": "<MERCHANT URL>/irpa",    
     "method": "POST",
     "status": 400,
     "type": "base:constraint-violation-problem",
     "title": "400 Bad Request",
     "violations": [{"message":"The request property 'firstname' cannot be empty"}, {"message":"The request property 'zipcode' must be a 5 digit number, prefix with 0 if only 4 digits"}]  
}

Unexpected error: Code 500

Code 500 means an unexpected error occurred on the server-side.

Example with values

Request

curl -X POST
  -H "Content-Type: application/json"
  -H "Accept: application/json"
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <OIDC ACCESS TOKEN>"
  -d '{
  "person" : {
        "firstname" : "Daria",
        "lastname" : "Pepebe",
        "sex" : "female",
        "birthday" : "1980-01-01",
        "email" : "hello@hello.de",
        "address" : {
            "street" : "Rheinstr.",
            "streetNumber" : "46",
            "zipcode" : "76532",
            "city" : "Baden-Baden",
            "country" : 276
          }
     }
}'
  "<MERCHANT URL>/irpa"

Response

{
    "identity":{
        "dicresponse":{
            "digitalIdentityCheck":{
                "featureCode":"PPB",
                "featureCodeOriginal":"PPB1",
                "deliveryCode":"76532176046"
            }
        }
    }
}