Embedded finance

Document verification inside your product.

Q: Why Cogneris instead of Plaid for income verification?

Plaid is excellent when the user's payroll provider is in Plaid's network. Cogneris covers the gap — 1099 contractors, gig workers, employer verification letters, payslips from smaller payroll providers. Most lenders use both.

Q: Can we use Cogneris without redirecting users to a third-party portal?

Yes. The API is fully headless. Your app captures the document upload, sends it to Cogneris, gets structured data back. No Cogneris branding visible to your users.

Q: Does Cogneris handle state-level compliance requirements?

We support workflow-level configuration for NY DFS Part 500, CA DFPI MTL, TX DOB, and the major state lender frameworks. Each verification produces evidence aligned with the framework's documentation requirements.

Q: What happens to documents after verification?

Default retention is 90 days, configurable to 0 (no retention beyond the request). Audit metadata (decision, timestamp, model version) is retained per your contract — typically 7 years for AML purposes.

Q: Can Cogneris extract from international IDs?

Yes — major OECD passports and IDs are supported with MRZ checksum and structural integrity validation. State-specific compliance rules apply per the applicable jurisdiction.

Neobanks and lenders need document checks at onboarding but can't afford the latency or UX disruption of redirecting users to a third-party portal. Cogneris embeds directly in your flow — sub-3-second results, no context switch.

Book a demo API reference

The challenge

Document friction costs you customers.

Onboarding drop-off

Redirecting users to a third-party verification portal during account opening breaks the flow. Every additional step loses a percentage of users you'll never recover.

Review queue latency

Manual document review means applicants wait hours for a decision. In a market where competitors approve in minutes, that wait destroys conversion.

Compliance requirements

Lending and account-opening regulations require documented proof of income, identity, and address — all of which must be verified, stored, and auditable on demand.

How Cogneris helps

Embedded, white-label, sub-3-second.

Cogneris's API integrates directly into your onboarding flow. Users upload documents inside your product, and extraction results arrive before they have time to lose patience — returning normalised income, address, and identity fields ready to use.

White-label API — users never see a third-party interface. Document upload and feedback happen entirely within your product's UX.
Pre-built models for finance documents — payslips return net/gross income, employment status, and employer name. Bank statements return transaction history and average balance. Utility bills return address and date.
Confidence-gated auto-approval — high-confidence extractions approve instantly. Edge cases route to your review queue with pre-filled data, not a blank form.
Regulatory-ready storage — documents and extraction results stored with configurable retention periods and GDPR-compliant data-processing agreements.

Payslip extraction — onboarding

employerTech Corp Ltda.

gross_salaryUS$ 12,480.00

net_salaryUS$ 9,856.00

employment_typeFull-time — permanent

ref_month2026-03

confidence0.97 → auto-approved

Decision returned in 2.4s

Supported: Payslips · Bank statements · Utility bills · Tax returns · National IDs

<3s

End-to-end document verification

100%

White-label — your brand, your UX

Core finance document types pre-built

99.2%

Accuracy on payslips and statements

Embedded finance specifics

Built for in-flow KYC.

Embedded finance products live or die on conversion at the identity-verification step. Three-second response times aren't a stretch goal; they're the difference between a user finishing onboarding and dropping off. Every architectural choice in Cogneris's embedded-finance configuration optimizes for that latency budget without compromising the regulator-facing audit trail underneath.

Sub-3-second extraction

ID, payslip, bank-statement extraction in under 3 seconds at the 95th percentile. Headless API — no third-party redirect, no UX context-switch.

Income verification stack

Cross-references payslips, bank statements, and verification letters. Returns reconciled monthly income with audit lineage. Works as a Plaid alternative for pay-stub income.

State-aware compliance

FFIEC, BSA/AML, and state-level KYC requirements (NY DFS, CA DFPI, TX DOB) configurable per workflow.

Regulator-ready evidence

Every verification produces an immutable evidence record: extraction inputs, decision rationale, model version, reviewer if any. Ready for examiner sampling.

The embedded-finance stack

Plays well with your existing rails.

Cogneris slots into the toolchain neobanks, lenders, and embedded-finance platforms already run — augmenting income and identity data, not replacing it.

Plaid — Use Cogneris for income docs that Plaid can't access (1099s, employer letters, pay-stubs from non-Plaid-connected payrolls). Same schema, complementary coverage.
Argyle / Pinwheel — Cross-validate Argyle/Pinwheel payroll data against extracted pay-stubs for fraud detection.
Alloy / Persona — Cogneris handles the document-AI side of the verification stack; Alloy/Persona orchestrate the rules. We integrate as a verification step in the orchestration.
Card issuers — Marqeta, Lithic, Stripe Issuing — extracted KYC artifacts pushed directly into card-issuance workflows.
Core banking — Direct integrations with Treasury Prime, Synctera, and Unit for embedded-banking platforms.

Documents we extract

The document types behind onboarding and underwriting at the partner layer.

Embedded finance products run KYC, bank statement underwriting, and counterparty risk reviews at scale — across hundreds of partner brands. Cogneris extracts each input into structured fields your decision engine can consume.

For category context, see the IDP buyer's guide, the 2026 State of Document AI report, or estimate ROI at your volume.

Bank statement extraction — cash-flow underwriting for small-business borrowers with transactions, balances, NSF detection, and recurring-deposit patterns from US/CA statements.
KYC document extraction — government IDs, proof of address, and beneficial-ownership certifications for CIP/CDD on every onboarded merchant.
Invoice extraction — counterparty invoices for revenue verification, with vendor, line items, and totals used to corroborate volume claims during onboarding.

FAQ

Common questions.

Why Cogneris instead of Plaid for income verification?

Plaid is excellent when the user's payroll provider is in Plaid's network. Cogneris covers the gap — 1099 contractors, gig workers, employer verification letters, payslips from smaller payroll providers. Most lenders use both.

Can we use Cogneris without redirecting users to a third-party portal?

Yes. The API is fully headless. Your app captures the document upload, sends it to Cogneris, gets structured data back. No Cogneris branding visible to your users.

Does Cogneris handle state-level compliance requirements?

We support workflow-level configuration for NY DFS Part 500, CA DFPI MTL, TX DOB, and the major state lender frameworks. Each verification produces evidence aligned with the framework's documentation requirements.

What happens to documents after verification?

Default retention is 90 days, configurable to 0 (no retention beyond the request). Audit metadata (decision, timestamp, model version) is retained per your contract — typically 7 years for AML purposes.

Can Cogneris extract from international IDs?

Yes — major OECD passports and IDs are supported with MRZ checksum and structural integrity validation. State-specific compliance rules apply per the applicable jurisdiction.

Embedded intelligence

Document verification that feels like part of your product.

30 minutes to see it running inside a sample onboarding flow. We bring the demo; you decide if it fits.

Book a demo API reference