From signed proposal to ID verified in Xama
There is a moment right after a client signs when they are as engaged as they will ever be. They have made the decision, they are pleased with it, and they are sitting there with your proposal open.
And then, a day or two later, you email them again to ask for a copy of their passport.
It is the least impressive moment in the whole relationship. The client has just agreed to pay you every month for the foreseeable future and the first thing that happens is admin, delivered late, by someone they have not met. Half of them do it straight away. The other half you chase twice, and the engagement letter sits unfinished for a fortnight while you do.
If your firm uses Xama, that gap is now closed.
The ID check happens at signing, not a week later
As soon as a client signs, they are asked to verify their identity. They tap through to Xama's own secure page, do the check there on the phone in their hand, and come back to your onboarding form.
Sign, verify, onboard. One sitting, while they are still in the room or still at their desk.
The ID check sits in the run of steps that follow a signature, and the order is fixed so the client is never asked to choose between them. Where a firm has a direct debit step switched on, setting up the mandate comes first and the ID check follows it. The money question is the one you least want to leave until later.
The result appears on their prospect card in Power Pricing, so you can see where every client stands without opening a second system to find out.
It runs in your Xama, on your credits
This is your Xama account doing the work. You paste your own credentials in once, and from then on the checks are yours: your account, your credits, your compliance record, your relationship with Xama.
Power Pricing never handles identity documents. We do not see the passport, we do not store the document, and we never bill you for a check. We put the client in front of your Xama and read back the decision.
That is the same principle as our Xero and direct debit work. Your tools, your accounts, your money. We connect the steps that were already yours and stay out of the middle.
Four outcomes, not two
This is the part most integrations get wrong, so it is worth being clear about.
An ID check does not come back as a simple pass or fail. Somewhere between one in ten and one in twenty comes back as refer, which means a human needs to look at it. A blurry photo. A name that reads slightly differently on two documents. A perfectly ordinary client with an unusual passport.
A refer is not a failure and it is not a red flag. Treating it as one would have you chasing clients who have done nothing wrong, and would teach you to stop trusting what the system tells you.
So Power Pricing shows you four states, and says what each one means:
- In progress. The client has started, or Xama is still working.
- Verified. Passed, with the date.
- Referred. Needs your review in Xama. Not a failure.
- Failed. Did not pass.
If someone at your firm later clears a referral in Xama, that flows back and the client shows as verified here too.
It never blocks the client
Whatever happens with the ID check, the client carries on to your onboarding form. If they fail it, if they skip it, if they get distracted and close the tab, they still reach the next step.
That is deliberate. The check is your compliance process, and the decision about what to do with a failed or missing check is a professional judgement that belongs to you, not to a piece of software standing between you and a client who has just signed.
You can mark the step as required, which removes the skip link and makes the expectation clear. It still does not stop them, and you would not want it to.
Which proposals it runs on
You should not be paying to re-verify someone you verified last year, so this follows the type of proposal:
- New clients. Always, when you have the step switched on.
- Renewals and repricing. Only if you tick the box for it. Some firms re-verify periodically as policy, most do not.
- Extra work. Never. That client is already engaged and already verified.
You choose which checks to run, too. Photo ID is on by default. A selfie face match and a proof of address are there if you want them, each at its own cost from your Xama credits. Xama only charges when a check is completed, so a client who abandons halfway has not cost you anything.
What it does not do
Being straight about the edges, because you will find them anyway:
- It does not replace your client risk assessment. The AML risk assessment and onboarding checklist in Power Pricing work exactly as they did. Xama's result sits alongside them as evidence, and connecting the two more tightly is the next piece of work.
- Your onboarding form still asks for some details Xama also collects. We know. Xama's team flagged the same thing when they reviewed this, and we would rather fix it properly with them than guess at which questions to drop.
- It verifies the person who signs. If you need several directors or PSCs verified, that is still done in Xama. There is more than one legitimate approach to who a firm verifies, and we would rather ask than impose one.
- The client needs a camera. In practice that means a phone, which is what most people sign on anyway. A client signing at a desktop with no webcam will need to pick it up on their phone.
- It does not do ongoing monitoring. That lives in Xama, where it should.
Turning it on
It is in Settings, under Integrations, on the Xama card. You will need three values from Xama, all on the same screen there: an Application ID, an Application Secret and a Client ID.
Paste them in, choose which checks you want, and switch the step on. It stays off until you do, so nothing changes for your clients until you are ready. Send a proposal to yourself first and run the whole thing through, signature to ID check, before you use it on a real client.
Then tell us how it went. This is new, and the firms using it first shape what it becomes. Anything that felt clunky, anything that surprised you, anything you expected and did not get, we want to hear it.