Proving a client
is who they say
they are

The problem

Every UK law firm has to verify who its clients are before it can act for them. The rules are not optional and the regulator does check. In practice the work usually happens over email: a fee earner asks a client to photograph a passport and a utility bill, the client sends them from a phone, and someone saves the attachments into the matter folder.

That process fails in a specific way. It usually produces the documents but not the evidence of the decision — who reviewed them, what they concluded, when, and what happened about anything that looked wrong. Two years later, when the file is audited or a transaction is challenged, the folder holds a passport scan and nothing that shows the firm exercised judgement.

What I set out to build

The goal was a tool that made the compliant path the fastest path — so that using it properly took less effort than emailing attachments around, rather than more. Three constraints followed from that:

• The client should need no app, no account and no instructions. A link, a phone, a few minutes.
• Nothing should be marked verified by a machine alone. Where a check flags, a named person at the firm makes the call and that decision is recorded.
• The output has to be a document a firm can hand to an auditor without assembling anything.

How it works

A fee earner sends a verification request against a matter. The client opens the link on their phone, photographs their ID and completes the checks in one sitting. Results come back into the firm's dashboard with an AML risk level attached.

Anything clean can be signed off immediately. Anything that flags is routed to the firm's MLRO — the person legally responsible for money-laundering reporting — who records a decision and the reasoning behind it. The finished record exports as a PDF that sits in the matter file.

Design decisions worth explaining

Where it is now

MatterProof is running as a private pilot with a small number of firms. It is not generally available, and I would rather say that plainly than dress a pilot up as a launch. The pilot exists to find out what breaks in real practice — the awkward client who cannot work a camera, the matter that needs re-verifying, the partner who wants a report in a format I did not anticipate.

Why this sits on a web design studio's site

Because it is the same work. A marketing site that has to explain a regulated product to a sceptical professional audience, an application behind it that people use daily, and one person responsible for both the design and the code. That is what I do for clients, done here without a client.

MatterProof is a Falcon Creative product. Screenshots show demonstration data — no real client or firm information appears anywhere on this page. Nothing here constitutes legal or compliance advice; firms remain responsible for their own regulatory obligations.