Released: June 11, 2026
This release delivers a set of improvements to the ID Verification feature, giving staff clearer visibility into verification outcomes, direct access to identity documents, and more accurate name-matching for students with non-standard name formats.
The updates address three needs in the verification workflow: staff who may need access to view the actual identity artifacts, verification factors that weren't fully surfaced inside Element451, and a name-matching algorithm that was generating false mismatches for students with names containing hyphens, apostrophes, spaces and other special characters.
View identity verification documents: Permissioned staff can now view and download identity documents (ID front, ID back, and selfie) directly from a contact's Profile Data page. A "View Identity Documents" button is now available and and is controlled by two new permissions: View ID Documents (grants access to the side sheet) and Download ID Documents (unlocks the ability to download the source files). The button only appears when a student has a Verified or Failed status, and no document images are stored in Element451 — all access is via short-lived, secure links from Stripe.
📌 Note: The two new permissions—View Identity Documents and Download Identity Documents—have been added to the system-delivered Element451 Administrator permission group. All other permission groups will need to be updated and assigned manually by an Element451 Administrator.
New status: Verification Risk: A system status automatically applied when Stripe's returns a top-level result as "Verified" but one or more fraud-indicative signals are present on the underlying checks—such as elevated document fraud risk, a selfie liveness failure, a duplicate selfie or risky behavior flagged across the Stripe network. Because none of these signals individually trigger a failure, this status is designed for schools that prefer to take a closer look at possible borderline verifications before moving forward with the application and decision process. The student is not blocked from submitting or continuing their application, and schools can use segments to identify this group and determine the appropriate next steps.
New status: Manually Failed: A staff-set status that gives admissions and enrollment staff a way to explicitly fail a verification after reviewing it. This is the negative counterpart to the existing Manual Verification status: where Manual Verification allows staff to manually approve a contact, Manually Failed allows them to record a deliberate rejection. A contact set to Manually Failed is blocked in the same way as the system Failed status.
Improved name-matching for verification: The verified Stripe name to Element451 applicant name-matching logic has been further improved to address mismatches we were seeing on last names that contained special characters, spaces, and similar variations. Additional data normalization further reduces false mismatch flags for students with hyphenated, apostrophe-containing, spaced, or all-caps names as they appear on government-issued IDs.
Together, these updates reduce friction and manual workarounds in the verification review process. Staff now have greater access access to confirm a student's identity, suspicious-but-verified submissions are now surfaced automatically for review rather than silently passing, and staff have a complete set of manual override options in both directions. Students with non-standard name formats are also less likely to be incorrectly flagged—resulting in a smoother admissions workflow and fewer support escalations.
Coming Soon
Verification Attempt Limits. A follow-up release will cap the number of identity verification attempts at 3 per student. This ensures that students who are repeatedly failing or mismatching cannot retry an unlimited number of times, protecting schools from runaway verification costs on submissions that are unlikely to ever pass.
