Dossier Validation vs ID Check: CheckFile, Onfido, Veriff, Sumsub

Ask a compliance team whether they "verify documents" and you will get two very different answers. One team means: is this passport genuine, and is the person holding the phone the person in the photo? The other means: do these twelve pages, from payslips to a company registry extract, tell one coherent and true story? Both are called document verification. They are different problems, and the tools built for one rarely solve the other well.

This comparison looks at four vendors buyers often shortlist together: CheckFile, Onfido (now part of Entrust), Veriff and Sumsub. Three of them are identity verification specialists. One is built for full-dossier validation. Knowing which is which saves months of procurement.

Two problems that share a name

ID verification: is this person real?

Identity verification (IDV) answers a narrow, critical question at onboarding. The user photographs an identity document, takes a selfie, and the system checks the document's security features, extracts its data, matches the face and confirms liveness, meaning a live person is present rather than a photo, a replay or a deepfake. The output is a decision on one person, usually in seconds, inside a mobile or web capture flow.

Dossier validation: does the whole file hold together?

Many business processes do not stop at identity. A mortgage broker needs payslips, bank statements and a tax notice. A letting agent needs proof of income, a guarantor's documents and proof of address. An insurer handling a claim receives invoices, quotes, reports and certificates. A B2B onboarding team needs a company registry extract, bank details and the director's ID. Here the risk is rarely a fake passport. It is an edited payslip, an income figure that does not match the tax notice, an IBAN in someone else's name, or a supporting document produced with a generative AI tool. Catching that requires reading every document, extracting its data and checking each one against the others and against official sources.

That is full-dossier validation, and it is where CheckFile sits.

How we evaluated the tools

We looked at each vendor's own product pages and documentation, and scored them on six buyer questions:

• What is checked: identity documents only, or the full range of supporting documents?
• Cross-document consistency: does the tool compare names, amounts, dates and addresses across documents?
• Registry checks: can data be verified against official company or government sources?
• AI-generation signals: does the tool look for synthetic or altered documents and deepfakes?
• Pricing model: per verification, per file, public or quote-based?
• Best fit: which flows each tool is actually designed for.

Comparison table

CheckFile: Our pick for full-dossier validation

CheckFile describes itself as AI-powered document validation, and the emphasis is on the file rather than the single document. It goes beyond OCR: it cross-checks every document in a dossier, verifies extracted data against official registries, flags signs of AI generation or deepfakes, and turns each verdict into a workflow action. The vendor is careful on that last point, saying its AI layer helps surface synthetic media "without claiming 100% detection", which is the honest framing buyers should expect from anyone in this space.

Its own comparison with Onfido is unusually candid: it credits Onfido with the stronger identity document coverage, selfie matching and liveness, and positions CheckFile on business documents, multi-document cross-validation, registry enrichment and custom business rules per partner. That matches what we see.

According to CheckFile, the platform reduces document validation time by up to 93%, at an average cost of €0.30 per file with 10 or more documents, and can be deployed in one to three weeks. Documents are hosted in France and Germany, encrypted with AES-256 and deleted after analysis. Plans are sized by monthly volume (Starter at 100 files, Business at 500, Enterprise unlimited), and the company offers a free pilot on your own documents with results in 48 hours. It targets organisations processing 100 or more files a month.

Limits: CheckFile is not a biometric onboarding SDK. If you need a selfie and liveness check inside a consumer app, you will pair it with an IDV provider.

Onfido (now Entrust): identity at scale

Onfido was acquired by Entrust, and its documentation now lives under the Entrust Identity Verification brand. The product set is mature: document reports with NFC reading of chip-enabled IDs, facial similarity and liveness verification, a Known Faces check for repeat attempts, a proof of address report, watchlist screening and device intelligence. Workflow Studio orchestrates these checks, and native SDKs cover iOS, Android, React Native and web.

Best for: consumer-facing apps that need a polished, high-conversion identity flow across many countries. It is not built to reconcile a payslip with a tax notice.

Veriff: global coverage and in-house models

Veriff positions itself as an enterprise identity verification platform. On its site it cites document support across 230+ countries and territories, passive liveness that requires no head turns, assisted image capture, and detection of synthetic IDs and deepfakes. It has expanded into proof of address, database and age verification, AML screening and business verification against registers it says cover 300+ jurisdictions. Veriff stresses that it builds its core models in-house. Pricing is published per verification, with a free trial and volume plans.

Best for: payments, lending, marketplaces and mobility companies onboarding users in many markets.

Sumsub: the all-in-one compliance stack

Sumsub frames its offer as trust infrastructure: user and business verification, liveness and deepfake detection, proof of address, non-document verification, AML transaction monitoring and fraud prevention in one platform, with case management and reporting on top. It publishes per-verification plans with monthly minimum commitments, and has added AI-assisted configuration of flows.

Best for: fintech, crypto and marketplace teams that want KYC, KYB and ongoing monitoring from one vendor.

Which flows need dossier validation

Banking, lending and KYC

Account opening needs identity. Credit decisions need proof. A loan file combines payslips, tax returns, bank statements and, for businesses, a recent company registration. CheckFile's banking and KYC workflow checks income consistency between payslips and tax returns, the age of company registrations and whether the IBAN holder matches the applicant. An IDV tool confirms who the borrower is. It does not confirm that their income is real.

Real estate and tenant files

A rental application is a small dossier: ID, several payslips, tax notices, a guarantor's file and proof of address. The questions are about coherence: same name and address everywhere, income around three times the rent, payslips that match each other. Proof of address alone is a recurring weak point, and CheckFile has a dedicated proof of address verification flow that checks issuer, date and signs of tampering.

Insurance claims

Claims arrive with invoices, repair quotes, reports and photos in every format. Identity is rarely in doubt. Whether the invoice is genuine, and whether dates and amounts match the declaration, is the real question. CheckFile's claims validation for insurers focuses on consistency between the declaration and its attachments, deadlines and anomalies.

B2B onboarding and KYB

Veriff and Sumsub both verify companies against registers, which covers the entity check well. Supplier and client dossiers often go further: insurance certificates, bank details, tax and social compliance certificates. That long tail of documents, and their consistency with the registry, is dossier work.

Combining both is common, and often right

These tools are frequently complementary rather than competing. A digital lender might use Onfido, Veriff or Sumsub for the selfie and ID step at sign-up, then pass the applicant's supporting documents to CheckFile before the credit decision. CheckFile's own comparison page says as much. The practical buying question is not "which one?" but "which risk sits in my flow?"

• If the main risk is impersonation at account creation, start with an IDV provider.
• If the main risk is forged or inconsistent supporting documents, start with dossier validation.
• If both, run them in sequence and keep one audit trail per applicant.

Verdict

Onfido, Veriff and Sumsub are strong, proven choices for identity and liveness, each with its own emphasis: Onfido on mature SDKs, Veriff on global coverage and in-house models, Sumsub on an all-in-one compliance stack. For lending, rental, insurance claims and B2B dossiers, where the fraud hides in the supporting documents, CheckFile is our pick: it is the only one of the four designed around cross-checking a complete file, verifying it against registries and flagging AI-generated documents. The free pilot makes it cheap to test on your own files before committing.