How FERIK verifies businesses

A business appears in FERIK search once its verification is approved, and that comes from a real review — not a checkbox ticked during sign-up.

Every provider registers through FERIK Hub and picks a verification track that matches how they're set up: KYB for a registered company, KYC for an individual or informal operator. They submit identifying details and reference numbers for their supporting documents, and can upload a file for each document, which is encrypted before it is stored. A reviewer works from the document number, its expiry and the uploaded file.

From there, the case goes into a review queue, and we want to be upfront about what happens next: no automated ID-checking or business-registry lookup service is connected yet, so every single case is decided by a human reviewer, not a match/no-match algorithm pretending otherwise. A reviewer can accept or flag each submitted document individually, with a note, and then approve the case, ask for changes, or reject it outright. If a reviewer asks for changes, the provider can fix the flagged documents and resubmit into that same case; a rejection means starting over with a fresh submission.

An approval isn't permanent — it's valid for 12 months. Once it lapses, the business loses its verified badge and drops out of search results until it goes through the process again. That single expiry rule is the one place in our system that decides whether a business counts as "verified" — search, the public profile badge, and the provider's own dashboard all use the same check. Search is refreshed whenever a business, its listings or its reviews change, and there is no scheduled sweep yet, so a lapsed approval can stay listed until then.