A notarial act is only as sound as the identity behind it. ProntoID gives your office machine-assisted credential analysis, biometric liveness and a sealed evidence packet for every appearing party — in 28 seconds, from any country.
Everything downstream of a notarial act — the register entry, the title, the incorporation, the succession — rests on one judgement made in a few seconds: this is the person named in this document.
That judgement is made by eye, on a document that may have been issued by any of 195 countries, in a script the notary may not read, with security features they have never seen. Forgery has become an industrial product; the naked eye has not improved since 1850.
And unlike almost every other professional, the notary who is deceived carries the consequence personally — in liability, in disciplinary exposure, and in the reputation of an office that may have taken a generation to build.
A photocopy in a folder shows none of these things. It shows only that a photocopy was taken.
ProntoID does not decide who the client is. It gives the notary far better evidence on which to decide — and a durable record of what that evidence was.
Over 10,000 document types from 195+ countries. Machine-readable zones are parsed and check-digit validated, security features assessed, expiry and issuing authority read directly from the document rather than from what the client typed.
A depth-aware liveness check confirms a living person is present — defeating printed photographs, replayed video, screen captures, virtual cameras and synthetic faces. The result is scored, timestamped and recorded.
The live capture is compared against the portrait on the presented credential, returning a confidence score rather than a yes. The notary sees the number, the threshold, and the images the comparison was made from.
Every verification produces one file: the checks, the scores, the captures, the moment. It is hashed on creation, so any later alteration is detectable — by you, by a supervisor, or by a court.
The single sharpest gain. A Sion office asked to authenticate a Brazilian founder or a Nigerian heir now has the same analytical depth on their document as on a Swiss identity card. Cross-border files stop being the risky ones.
Send one link. The client completes the verification on their own phone, in their own time, in about 28 seconds. You open the file already knowing whether there is a problem — instead of discovering it with the parties in the room.
We would rather lose a sale than have a notary discover a limitation after signing. Vendors in this market routinely blur the line between assisting the notarial function and performing it. We do not.
Most offices begin with pre-appointment screening on cross-border files, and expand once the evidence quality becomes visible in practice.
One link, sent by email or SMS when the appointment is booked. The client verifies on their own phone before they arrive. You open the file already knowing whether the document holds up — and whether the appointment should proceed at all.
For parties who appear in person or by video. The same analysis, run live, with the notary watching the result assemble. Useful precisely where instinct says something is slightly wrong but the document looks clean.
Every verification produces a single sealed file — checks, scores, captures, timestamps — exported into your own protocol and archive. Powered by ProntoVault, so tampering is detectable for as long as the file must be kept.
The identification component of customer due diligence, produced in a consistent, inspectable form across every file. Purpose-built for property transactions and company formations, where notarial AML exposure concentrates.
Heirs abroad, founders in another hemisphere, mandators who cannot travel. Verification travels to them at the same standard, removing the usual choice between delaying the file and accepting a weaker identification.
A documented REST API with webhooks and a full sandbox, so verification can be triggered from the tools your office already uses rather than becoming another window to keep open. Or use the hosted portal and integrate nothing.
The workflow was designed around how notarial offices already operate — appointment, preparation, act, protocol — rather than asking the office to reorganise itself around a piece of software.
Request a WalkthroughYour office sends a verification link to each party — from the portal, or automatically from your practice software through the API. No account, no app, no download for the client.
They photograph their document, and complete a short liveness check. Around 28 seconds. If the document is two-sided, both sides are required before any assessment is made.
Every check reported individually — MRZ integrity, check digits, expiry, face match score, liveness outcome, capture moment. Not a green tick. The material you need to form your own view.
On completion the sealed evidence packet is exported into your archive, where it stays for as long as your retention duty requires. ProntoID keeps the hash that proves it is unaltered — not the personal data.
Your protocol · Your archive · Your control
There is a genuine tension between privacy-first identity verification, which is built on retaining as little as possible, and notarial record-keeping, which is built on retaining almost everything for decades.
Rather than paper over it, the notarial product inverts our default. The evidence lives where it legally belongs — in your protocol, under your professional secrecy, subject to your retention schedule and your supervisory authority. ProntoID retains only the hash required to prove the packet has not been altered.
Three separate movements are converging on the notarial profession at once — and each of them raises the evidentiary standard for identity.
Notaries are named obliged entities under the EU Anti-Money Laundering Regulation (EU) 2024/1624, which applies directly in every member state from 10 July 2027 with no national transposition — supervised through AMLA in Frankfurt. Customer due diligence stops being a document-collection exercise and becomes an evidence standard. Swiss offices with EU-facing files feel it too.
Electronic public deeds and notarisations have a settled Swiss framework under the EÖBV, with notaries acting through their entry in the register of authenticating officials. Since 1 April 2026 the rules on electronic company incorporation have widened considerably, permitting e-notarisation of the deed of incorporation and digital submission to the cantonal register — with cantonal practice still varying.
In the United States, the large majority of states now permit remote online notarization, with identity proofing built on credential analysis plus knowledge-based authentication. Cantonal remote-certification regimes and EU company-law digitalisation push in the same direction: physical presence is no longer the only lawful way to appear.
These references are provided as orientation, not as legal advice. Notarial law is national and, in Switzerland, cantonal; requirements differ substantially between jurisdictions and change frequently. Every office should confirm its own position with its supervisory authority before altering practice.
For most professions the case for identity technology is efficiency. For notaries it is exposure. The minutes saved are pleasant; the file that never becomes a claim is the point.
A single deed executed on a forged credential can cost an office more than a decade of subscription — before counting the disciplinary consequences, the professional indemnity implications, and the standing that does not come back.
No — and it is not designed to. In civil-law jurisdictions the identification of the appearing party is a personal, non-delegable duty of the notary. ProntoID performs machine-assisted credential analysis and biometric liveness, then hands the notary a structured, timestamped dossier. The finding of identity, and the responsibility for it, remain entirely with the notary.
ICAO 9303 passports (TD3), national identity cards (TD1/TD2), EU and EEA driving licences, US state IDs and driver's licences — over 10,000 document types from 195+ countries. Machine-readable zones are parsed and check-digit validated; where an MRZ is present it takes precedence over any optically read or user-entered value.
ProntoID covers the credential analysis and biometric identity proofing components. Most US states additionally require dynamic knowledge-based authentication drawn from public and proprietary data sources, which ProntoID does not provide. A notary operating under a state RON commission would therefore pair ProntoID with a KBA provider and an approved audio-visual platform, and should confirm the combination against their commissioning authority's rules.
In the notary's custody. ProntoID is built on data minimisation, which sits awkwardly with notarial retention duties measured in decades — so the notary product inverts the default: the verification produces a sealed evidence packet that is exported into the office's own protocol and archive. ProntoID retains the cryptographic hash needed to prove the packet has not been altered, not the underlying personal data.
Notaries are named obliged entities under the EU Anti-Money Laundering Regulation (EU) 2024/1624, which applies directly in all member states from 10 July 2027, and are already subject to equivalent duties under Swiss and national law. ProntoID produces the identification and evidence layer of customer due diligence — verified document, verified holder, verified moment — in a form that stands up to supervisory inspection.
ProntoID sits upstream of the deed. It establishes who the appearing party is; the electronic public deed itself is created and signed by the notary in notary mode, using their own qualified signature and their entry in the Swiss register of authenticating officials (UPReg). ProntoID does not sign deeds and does not require access to your signing infrastructure.
The notary sees why. Every check is reported individually — MRZ integrity, check digits, expiry, document-specific security features, face match score, liveness result — rather than a single opaque pass or fail. A refusal is a prompt to look more closely, not an instruction to turn the client away.
A complete verification — document capture, MRZ parsing, biometric liveness and face match — averages 28 seconds. Clients receive a single link by email or SMS and complete it on their own phone, typically before the appointment.
We work with notarial offices one at a time, because every jurisdiction is different. Tell us where you practise and what your files look like, and we will tell you honestly whether we help.
Swiss-operated · GDPR & revFADP aligned · No client software to install