--- title: Stripe Identity slug: stripe-identity published_at: 2021-06-15 16:50:40 +0000 updated_at: 2023-01-30 22:53:26 +0000 summary: description: Stripe Identity lets you programmatically confirm the identity of global users so you can prevent attacks from fraudsters while minimizing friction for legitimate customers. In this edition, you'll learn how to implement an Identity integration using Stripe.js to open the modal based verification flow. ### Table of contents 00:05 Introduction 00:55 Overview of identity verification 01:54 Common use-cases for Stripe Identity 03:28 What makes Stripe Identity special 04:56 Setup a small HTML client 06:41 Create a VerificationSession on the server 08:48 Initiate the identity verification flow 10:15 Handle verification session events 14:11 Recap ### Presenters Iñigo Beitia Arevalo - Engineer on Stripe Identity - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ibeitia/ CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Resources Official documentation: https://stripe.com/docs/identity Code: https://github.com/stripe-samples/developer-office-hours/tree/master/2021-06-15-identity ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team on Discord at https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat. ### Updates Sign up to stay updated with developer news: https://go.stripe.global/dev-digest ### Feedback If you have any feedback about this or other episodes, let us know: https://forms.gle/VjNqzRhotM2snYo88. #Stripe #Payments tags: [stripe, payments, Stripe Identity, identity, create verification sessions, VerificationSession, @cjav_dev] views: 4268 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/stripe-identity youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUgnRq9jC7s youtube_id: mUgnRq9jC7s embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/mUgnRq9jC7s thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/mUgnRq9jC7s/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Stripe Identity *Published: June 15, 2021* *Views: 4268* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUgnRq9jC7s) [![Stripe Identity](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/mUgnRq9jC7s/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUgnRq9jC7s) ## Description Stripe Identity lets you programmatically confirm the identity of global users so you can prevent attacks from fraudsters while minimizing friction for legitimate customers. In this edition, you'll learn how to implement an Identity integration using Stripe.js to open the modal based verification flow. ### Table of contents 00:05 Introduction 00:55 Overview of identity verification 01:54 Common use-cases for Stripe Identity 03:28 What makes Stripe Identity special 04:56 Setup a small HTML client 06:41 Create a VerificationSession on the server 08:48 Initiate the identity verification flow 10:15 Handle verification session events 14:11 Recap ### Presenters Iñigo Beitia Arevalo - Engineer on Stripe Identity - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ibeitia/ CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Resources Official documentation: https://stripe.com/docs/identity Code: https://github.com/stripe-samples/developer-office-hours/tree/master/2021-06-15-identity ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team on Discord at https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat. ### Updates Sign up to stay updated with developer news: https://go.stripe.global/dev-digest ### Feedback If you have any feedback about this or other episodes, let us know: https://forms.gle/VjNqzRhotM2snYo88. #Stripe #Payments ## Transcript [Music] so as an online business one of the challenges you might face is establishing a high level of trust and confidence in who a user is properly identifying users can be challenging and often involves collecting sensitive documents like passports and driver's licenses and then integrating with third parties to verify the authenticity of those documents today you'll learn about some brand new tools available with the stripe api to help welcome back to stripe developer office hours i'm cj a developer advocate and i'm joined today by enigo an engineer on the identity product team and we're so excited to tell you all about identity and show you how to get started with the basic integration hey anigo thanks so much for joining us today to start off could you just tell us first a little bit more about what identity is and then how developers can use this awesome new product hi cj thanks for having me stripe identity essentially allows you to confirm that your users are who they claim they are and having the certainty is really important for online businesses as one of the things that we've learned is that every single online business is eventually going to become the target of fraud this is a problem that we're very familiar with at stripe you know we get attacked on a daily basis by sophisticated fraud rings and identity verification has proven to be a useful tool to stop these fraudsters in fact identity is built on the same infrastructure that we that strive uses to onboard millions of users as part of our kyc and risk operations and with this product we wanted to make it very accessible for every business to verify their own users and that's what identity is it's a simple api and a hosted experience that allows any developer to collect and verify ids from all over the world awesome so it sounds like stripe is using this really well for their onboarding flow and now we want to make this available for the masses so what are some common use cases that other businesses or developers might be thinking about as they go into building an integration with identity sure so there's a few use cases that we've seen businesses use identity for one of the main ones is reducing fraud losses so we've seen sas companies that are using identity verification as part of their own boarding to make sure that you know people are not signing up with stolen credit cards or they're not creating fake accounts we've also seen some businesses use identity to prevent account takeovers so you know when they see something suspicious happening on an account they can surface an identity verification and confirm that you know whoever's using that account actually owns it another use case that we've seen that's that's very important is increasing trust and safety in online communities which is becoming more and more important as more of these interactions are happening online and with things like gig economy platforms where like you're booking things online and meeting people face to face in in real life it's very important to have sort of trust and identity uh in the platform to make sure that you know bad actors are not signing up for these services another big use case is also sort of meeting legal requirements um you know fintech companies or crypto companies which stripe identity supports sometimes have requirements legal requirements to collect and verify information from their users and identity makes it really easy to do so and these are just some of the use cases that we've seen you know i'm sure there's a lot more that we haven't thought of super cool inigo i can totally see how this would be really useful for developers can you tell us a little bit more about what makes stripe identity and that product so special maybe a little bit of behind the scenes sure so first the stripe identity api which we spend a lot of time trying to make it super easy to get started with so you can like create a prototype and start collecting ids in just like a matter of minutes and then the hosted experience which saves you a ton of development time and you know we've made sure that it works across devices it's translated in a lot of languages and it maximizes sort of the metrics that businesses care about such as like conversion rates and verification rates but also we've invested a lot in machine learning so we have advanced machine learning models not just to capture the documents but also to verify them so on the capture side you know we have things like blur detection reflection detection real-time document decoding auto capture which i think is really cool and then on the fraud prevention side you know we use several fraud models to detect fakes and prevent presentation attacks which is where fraudsters are using like a picture of a document instead of a document itself and the best part is that these fraud models are not static you know we're constantly updating them incorporating what we see across the stripe network that means that for developers you know their integration gets and their verifications get more accurate without them having to make any code changes so we think that's pretty special and overall i mean we're trying to make it so that we're not just preventing fraud but you know we're giving the best user experience possible to legitimate users this sounds amazing and super powerful and you go thanks so much this is really really exciting stuff why don't we jump in and write a little bit of code let's do it there are three main pieces to building an identity verification integration with the api number one you're going to create a verification session on the server and then number two you're going to initiate that verification flow either by redirecting server side to a url or by opening the modal flow and using stripe.js to go to verification below number three we're going to handle verification event notifications with a webhook handler all right let's get started so from the terminal i'm going to run stripe samples create developer office hours and we'll give it an alias of identity we're going to use the node server today we have a starter episode if you're curious about how to go from zero to one with node you can check that out it's also on this stripe developers channel all right so let's jump into index.html and we want to load stripe.js we're gonna load this directly from js.stripe.com we'll change the header and we'll add a button that when clicked will initiate that verification flow we'll add a script tag here at the bottom where we're going to initialize an instance of the stripe object with our publishable key and we'll grab reference to that button and add a click handler we want to say that when this button is clicked we're going to create the verification session on the server and then we're going to open that modal and push through the verification flow on the client right next we'll cd into that server directory install the dependencies with npm install and then run npm start to start the server listening on port 4242 now we can point our browser at localhost 4242 and see the html that we just wrote and we'll also notice that when we click the button nothing happens because we haven't wired up those two steps for the verification flow so from server.js we'll add a new endpoint for creating verification sessions when you create a verification session with the api you configure what types of information to collect after successfully verifying the user's identity this verification session object will also contain what we call verified outputs meaning that the data verified about this person will be available on the session so note that this endpoint should only be used with authenticated users this demo doesn't have any authentication layer but in production your application should only create verification sessions for those authenticated users the stripe api for creating a verification session accepts many different arguments you can pass in different types of verifications that you might want to make so verifying an address or an id number or a document you can also pass metadata so you might pass the id of the user in your database as part of the metadata for this verification session and finally there's a number of different options for what you want to configure when collecting when verifying documents you can require an id number you can require live capture you can also require matching selfie finally you can also optionally provide a return url to which the user will be redirected after they complete that verification flow to start out we'll just return the entire session back to the client now we can test this by using curl to send a post request to localhost 4242 create verification session and you'll see all the data that you get back when you've created a brand new verification session including this url so technically you could redirect to this url and view the hosted flow today we're going to use the modal based flow so we're not going to redirect to this url and with the modal based flow we're going to use the client secret property that client secret property lets your front end collect those sensitive verification documents it's single use and expires after 24 hours so you don't want to store it or log it or embed that anywhere in the url or expose it to anyone other than that authenticated user you want to make sure that you have tls enabled and send only that client secret property back to the front end to avoid exposing your configuration and any of the results from that verification session let's again test this endpoint with curl and we can verify that we are just getting back that client secret property everything looks great so let's head back to the front end to complete our click handler for that verification button we're going to use the fetch api to make a post request to create verification session this will return a promise that will resolve with that client secret property that we just talked about next we can go through that verification flow by calling dot verify identity and passing in the client secret now verify identity returns a promise that might resolve with an error property and if there's an error then we'll just alert that to the user all right let's take this thing for a spin so we can click on that verify button we'll see that a modal is opened and in test mode we have a couple different options first we have the option to simulate several different verification scenarios and outcomes and second we can preview what the user might see important note here the information collected in test mode is not actually verified so even if you provide real docs in test mode the verification might show as failed in the dashboard most of the time we're going to complete the verification session with this test data to simulate specific scenarios and build our automations around those now we can head over to the stripe dashboard and view that successful verification directly in the stripe dashboard we can see that it's verified and that it it checked both the document and the selfie again that was in test mode on to the third part of building an identity verification integration we'll head over to our web hook handler to handle some of the identity verification events so we're going to switch on the event type here and the very first event type that we want to handle is identity.verificationsession.verified in here you might do a number of different things you might send an email to the customer you might update your database and mark the customer as verified data for the verification session is available on event.data.object for now we'll log out the session that we were notified about today we'll use the stripe cli listen command so we can say stripe listen and then forward events to localhost 4242 this creates a direct connection between our stripe account and our local machine so that when events happen on our stripe account they're delivered to the local machine now if we go through the verification flow again and click submit when verifying successfully we'll notice that the logs here both for stripe listen and for our server we see that several web hook events are streaming in including this identity verification session verified event and we have logged out the verification session that we received in that webhook notification we can see the status is verified you might notice that in the data that was sent to us as part of that webhook notification it did not include verified outputs it did not include the verified data that the user had entered we need to use the expand feature of the api to re-retrieve that session and expand the verified outputs so here we'll create a new api call to re-retrieve that verification session passing in the id of the session and a request to expand the verified outputs for that session and we'll log out now the expanded session so that we can see what was actually verified for that user now if we again test that flow with a successful verification we'll see these events streaming in and now we can see the verified outputs that include the address the first name the id number and the last name of the customer you might compare the names that were returned on this verified output or other data from those verified outputs with the data that the user has entered into your system to gain an even greater level of confidence in the data that you have matching what this user has been verified to have the next webhook event type that we want to handle is identity verification session requires input this means that at least one of those document checks has failed because the type of our verification session is document and we need to maybe tell the user that they're blocked or remove their access or let them know to retry depending on how many times they've already tried we want to let the user know the implications of failing that verification flow we can also handle the specific error code for the failure depending on what the error code was for the error on the verification session you might choose to do a number of different things for instance during covid it's been really difficult to go in and renew certain documents so you might not consider a document expiration a limiting factor however if a document is not verified you might want to send some generic email saying we were unable to verify your documentation there are a number of different error codes that you'll find listed in the stripe documentation for different types of verification session failures you might want to handle each of those uniquely again when you're creating the verification session you can specify which types of documents to require including driver's license passport etc and if they're uploading a document type that is not supported you will also see this document type not supported error and then ultimately if the error code is not handled we want to raise an exception back up to the dev team and continue on all right let's re-test our verification flow this time we will fail the identity verification flow and you'll notice that in the server log we are logging out that verification session and it does give us the last error and that has the code that we can act on it also has the reason they're outlined explicitly and so our log statement here just says send that generic verification email all right let's do a quick recap we started in index.html where we included a new script tag to load stripe.js from js.stripe.com and then we added a button and we said that when that button is clicked we're going to do two things we'll make a post request to create the verification session on the server and then we're going to use the client secret property returned from that api call in order to push through that modal based verification flow then on the server we added a new endpoint for creating those verification sessions where we passed in the type of document and a couple of different options requiring that a selfie check happens finally in our web hook handler we added some code to automate some processes and some tasks based on whether or not the identity was verified or it required some more input or failed those checks just as some quick next steps you might consider adding a success page that will be shown after the modal is closed alternatively you might create a return url and be redirecting from the server to the hosted flow and then showing some success page after you've redirected back all right at this point you should be fully equipped to head out and build your own full-on identity verification flow using stripe identity thank you so much for your time and attention thanks for watching and thank you for joining us today thank you anigo so much for joining us today thanks cj that was awesome i just want people to know that identity is available today for businesses that are based in the u.s and uk and we've opened up the wait list for businesses in canada australia new zealand ireland germany and france so if you want to get started head over to stripe.com identity and i can't wait to see what developers built with this amazing thank you all right we'll see you next time you --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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