Instructure adds Veriff biometric ID checks to Parchment transcript requests

Students ordering official transcripts through Parchment may soon be asked to prove their identity with a government-issued document and a live biometric selfie.

The capability comes through a partnership between Instructure and Veriff, whose identity verification technology is integrated into Parchment Transcript Services.

A pilot with a small group of higher education institutions began in August, with general availability in the United States planned for November.

The check is intended to reduce impersonation and unauthorized requests for academic records. It verifies the identity of the person placing the order.

Institutions using Parchment will decide whether to enable the identity verification feature at the account level.

Veriff compares the requester’s government-issued identity document with a live selfie and returns a verification result and confidence score.

Each institution sets the confidence-score threshold required for an order to proceed. Results that fall below that threshold are held for registrar staff to verify.

“Registrars are spending hours reviewing orders by hand because they have no scalable way to confirm the person behind an account is real,” says Brian Cully, senior vice president of finance and strategy at Instructure.

Users who enter Parchment through an institution’s single sign-on system or with an institution-issued token are treated as authenticated and bypass the biometric check.

Instructure says the platform has helped the exchange of more than 165 million academic credentials.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  identity verification  |  selfie biometrics  |  Veriff