How Transport Giant SNCF Automates ID Verification Checks

SNCF has been in a leading position in the French transport sector for decades. With more than 15,000 trains running every day, the company helps more than 4 million passengers commute on a daily basis, among which 300,000 are children making use of the Junior & CIE service. 

With the Junior & CIE service, children aged 4 to 14 years can travel by train, accompanied by a trained and experienced member of SNCF’s staff. To ensure a safe and secure environment, SNCF has implemented identity verification procedures for the legal guardians of these children. Therefore, both the adults dropping off the children at departure points and those picking them up at their destination must undergo identity verification checks.

The ID verification process was first carried out manually. An SNCF employee at the point of departure manually noted down the identification details of the adult, such as name, or ID document number, and took a picture of the document. The same process was applicable to the legal guardian at the point of arrival. This soon became a real burden to SNCF employees, as handling personal information manually was neither scalable nor secure.

Assessing the situation, SNCF identified the following pain points of the manual process: 

Klippa’s identity verification powered by AI uses OCR technology to accurately capture, extract, and anonymize data from multiple identity documents, such as passports, ID cards, or driving licenses. Moreover, it is able to detect document fraud, keeping the verification check accurate. So how does that look in practice?

Using Klippa DocHorizon, SNCF was able to: