One Phone Number, Instant Trust: How Prove Powers Frictionless Age Verification at Veratad

Challenge

Age verification has become one of the most scrutinized issues in digital identity, for good reason. Getting it wrong isn't just a legal or financial risk for the digital platform clients Veratad serves. It's a matter of protecting children in online environments.

For years, verifying who was really on the other side of a screen meant collecting a full payload of personal information - name, address, date of birth, mobile number, Social Security number - and hoping it added up. Too often it didn't. 

The data was messy, easy to fake, and hard to tie to one real person. That uncertainty and subsequent friction landed at the worst possible moment: the very first step of onboarding, right when platforms most needed to earn a new customer's trust.

Solution

Before Prove, any case Veratad couldn't resolve with confidence fell into manual document review. Today, Prove reaches a clear determination on 99%+ of identity verification requests with just a phone number and date of birth, shrinking that high-friction fallback bucket enough to cut document-review escalations by more than 90%.

Veratad rebuilt identity verification around a simpler, harder-to-fake anchor: the SIM card in a customer’s mobile device, a hardware root of trust that could be cryptographically authenticated. 

With Prove's Mobile Auth and Identity Verify Solutions, Veratad's clients ask for just a phone number and date of birth instead of a full data payload. Prove checks that phone number against its Identity Graph, an identity record that ties a real device to a real human using deterministic signals, not guesswork. Verified data comes back in real time, replacing assumptions with a match that actually holds up.

Results

90% reduction in transactions requiring additional verification

‍Fewer escalations doesn't just mean less manual work. It means fewer legitimate customers abandoning signup mid-onboarding, faster time-to-revenue on new accounts, and a leaner compliance operation that can scale without scaling headcount. By anchoring verification to a phone number instead of a full data payload, Veratad cut the share of applications escalated for extra checks by up to 90% - removing friction for legitimate customers while keeping its age assurance & identity standards high.

Over five years of partnership‍

Veratad and Prove have worked together for over five years, with the relationship expanding well beyond the original use case as identity and age verification have become even more central to Veratad's business.

A partner built for a fast-moving regulatory landscape

Age verification requirements keep shifting, and Veratad needs a partner that can move at the same speed as the regulations built to protect children online.

Every new regulation raises the bar on what "verified" has to mean. Veratad doesn't scramble to keep up - their team built in the one thing that stays constant underneath all of it: a phone number tied to a real, cryptographically-confirmed human. That's not a compliance patch. That's the answer, however the rules change next.