Glossary  Address Validation 

Address Validation 

What is address validation?

Address validation refers to the process of ensuring address data quality, verifying whether a given postal address is formatted correctly according to postal standards. Unlike address verification, which often checks if the address belongs to a specific person, validation focuses on the structural correctness of the address itself. 

How does address validation work?

Address validation typically includes some of the following steps:

• Standardisation: formatting the address to match postal guidelines (e.g. correct street suffix and postcode structure).
• Correction: identifying and automatically fixing errors such as typos, missing house numbers or incorrect postcodes.

 In digital identity verification, this process is often automated via application programming interfaces (APIs), enabling real-time validation when a user enters their data online.

Where should address validation be used in the identity verification process?

Address validation plays a central role in multiple stages of the identity verification process:

Financial institutions and telecommunication providers use it to comply with anti-money laundering (AML) and customer onboarding regulations during KYC (Know Your Customer) checks.

Fraud prevention:  detecting false or suspicious addresses helps to reduce the risk of fraudulent account creation.

Customer onboarding:  Companies can verify that the data provided by customers is authentic and consistent with other verified identity documents.

Regulatory compliance:  industries bound by legal frameworks (e.g. GwG in Switzerland and AML in the EU) rely on accurate address validation to meet their requirements.

Validating addresses makes it more difficult for criminals to register with false information, helping to prevent fraud. In regulated industries, address validation is mandatory; companies that fail to validate customer information risk penalties, reputational damage, and increased exposure to fraud.

How PXL Vision uses address validation

If required by the customer or the use case, PXL Vision can integrate address validation directly into its identity verification solutions. Rather than treating address validation as a separate step, we combine it seamlessly with automated or manual document verification to create a comprehensive, end-to-end verification process. This ensures that, when a new user is onboarded, their identity documents and biometrics are checked and their provided address is validated and verified. In other words, PXL Vision can cover both steps of the address check process.

This approach is used across multiple industries, such as telecoms providers, who rely on address validation when activating SIM cards or subscription contracts, and financial institutions, insurance companies, pension funds, and AML and KYC processes.