We take verification seriously, because a Will is only as strong as the certainty of who made it.
Before Castle eWill & Trust will draft, store or release a single clause of your Will, we confirm that you are who you say you are. Not as a formality — as the safeguard that lets your family, your executors and, if it is ever questioned, a court, trust that the document is genuinely yours.
Why we ask
A Will is often times contested on one of two grounds.
Either the wishes it records are disputed, or the identity of the person who made it is. We cannot settle the first — that is between you and the people you name — but we can make the second beyond reasonable doubt.
That is the entire purpose of the identity check every client completes before their Will can be printed: a government-issued document authenticated against its own security features, the face of the person holding it, and a live camera check tying the two together — all in one session. Not one signal — three, judged as a whole.
We take this seriously enough to build it as a gate, not a suggestion: no Will is printed, and none of your details are committed to a document, until this check is complete.
What verification asks of you
Two documents, one short check.
Done once, at the very start — before you write a single detail of your Will.
A valid means of identification
Your international passport, driver's licence, national ID card, voter's card or residence permit — a government-issued document, not a self-declaration. You photograph it on camera, guided, or upload a clear photo or scan of it.
Your face, in the same session
A short guided selfie, taken live in the same session as your document, so the face compared with it is a person in front of the camera rather than a photograph supplied alongside.
A liveness check we do not mark ourselves
Whether the person in front of the camera is live — rather than a photograph, a screen or a recording — is judged by our identity provider, not by code running in your browser. Client-side checks can be looked up and defeated; this one cannot be, from where an attacker sits.
Document authentication and a face match
Your document is authenticated by our identity provider — its security features checked and the details printed on it read — and its photograph compared with your live selfie. Every outcome is available for one of our administrators to review.
What happens to your documents
Verified once. Protected always.
Encrypted at rest
Your Will is encrypted (AES-256-GCM) before it touches storage. Verification photographs are not stored at all — they go to our identity provider and are never written to our disks.
Read on a need-to-know basis
Every access to a stored document is checked against your account and logged, granted or refused. There is no general-purpose way to browse client documents.
A person reviews the outcome
Automated checks decide fast, obvious cases. Anything less than certain — and every account, if the check is unavailable — is queued for a member of our team to look at personally.
Ready when you are. Have your ID to hand.
Verification takes a few minutes. You will need your identity document to hand and a device with a camera.