Proof of Address

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This is an introductory guide and overview for the Proof of Address report and contains advice on results logic. You'll find API documentation separately.

The following guide assumes you are using API v3.5 onwards. If you are using an earlier version of the API some features of this report will not be available. If you would like to use the updated PoA report please upgrade your API integration to use at least v3.5.

If you're looking for PoA report information for earlier versions of our API, please see the respective API documentation or email our Client Support team.

Introduction

The Proof of Address (PoA) report enables the review of uploaded documents to verify an end user's address. The PoA report checks whether information provided by the applicant matches that on the PoA document, in addition to asserting whether the document is supported and has a valid date of issue.

Documents can be captured and uploaded using the Onfido SDKs or uploaded directly via the API. Users can upload PoA documents from anywhere in the world but the document must have been issued by a supported country and be a supported document for this report.

Supported issuing countries

Documents issued by the following countries are supported for a PoA report:

Group A:

• United Kingdom
• Isle of Man
• Jersey
• Gibraltar
• San Marino
• Andorra
• Switzerland
• Monaco

Group B:

• European Economic Area (excluding Greece, Cyprus and Bulgaria)
• Canada
• New Zealand

Group C:

• United States of America
• Australia
• Hong Kong
• Singapore
• Philippines
• Indonesia
• Vietnam
• Mexico
• Brazil
• Colombia
• Argentina
• Ghana
• Ivory Coast
• Kenya
• Nigeria
• Senegal
• South Africa
• Tanzania
• Uganda
• Turkey
• United Arab Emirates

Supported documents

The following document types are supported for a PoA report, along with its issue date validity based on document issuing country:

Document	Group A	Group B	Group C
Bank Statement or Building Society Statement	Last 3 months	Last 6 months	Last 3 months
Utility Bill (electricity, water, gas, broadband, landline )	Last 3 months	Last 6 months	Last 3 months
Council Tax letter	Last 1 year	Last 6 months
Benefits Letter (e.g. Job seeker allowance, House benefits, Tax credits)	Last 1 year	Last 6 months
Mortgage statement	Last 1 year	Last 1 year
Mobile phone bill		Last 6 months
General letter (financial institution/utility company)		Last 6 months
Insurance statement or brokerage statement		Last 6 months
Pension statement/letter or Property tax statement/letter		Last 1 year
Identity document with address	Supported	Supported		Limited to certificate's issue and expiry dates
Address certificate		Hungary only	Turkey only	Limited to certificate's issue and expiry dates if present, otherwise unlimited

Overall result logic

The PoA report can return a result of clear or consider or null.

The overall report result will be clear if all of the following are true:

• the quality of the provided PoA document is sufficient to process it
• the provided PoA document is a supported PoA document
• the provided PoA document has a valid date of issue
• the data provided by the applicant matches the data that is on their PoA document

The overall report result will be null if any of the following is true:

• the issuing_country field set when uploading the document is from an unsupported country
• the issuing_country field is not provided when uploading the document

Please note that if the report result is null, the report status will be cancelled.

The overall report result will be consider if any of the following is true:

• the document was not of sufficient quality to be processed (e.g. image blurred, data points not visible on the document). In this scenario, the value of the image_quality sub-breakdown (which is part of the image_integrity breakdown) will be unidentified and no data will be extracted from the document, hence the report properties attribute will be empty and all the other breakdowns will be null
• the document is not a valid PoA document: in this scenario the value of the supported_document sub-breakdown (which is part of the document_classification breakdown) will be unidentified, no data will be extracted from the document, hence the report properties attribute will be empty and the data comparison breakdowns will be set to null
• the document does not have a valid date of issue: in this scenario the value of the valid_document_date sub-breakdown (which is part of the document_classification breakdown) will be consider. Data is extracted from the document and returned as part of the report properties attribute.
• the data provided by the applicant does not match the data extracted from the PoA document. In this scenario the breakdowns first_name, last_name and address (which are part of the data_comparison breakdown) will have a value of unidentified. Data is extracted from the document and returned as part of the report properties attribute.