Residence permit verification
Residence permits are the identity document many onboarding flows forget: a foreign national may have no local passport or driving licence, but a residence permit proves both who they are and their right to be there. Zanyara reads and authenticates them the same rigorous way it handles passports — a capability competitors often bury behind “other documents.”
How Zanyara verifies a residence permit
- Read the printed and machine-readable dataThe visual fields are extracted by trained OCR and the machine-readable zone is parsed, with its check digits validated.
- Read the chip, where presentMany permits — the EU standard-format permit and the UK BRP among them — carry an eMRTD chip. Zanyara reads it on the applicant’s phone and runs passive authentication server-side (see NFC chip verification).
- CorroborateThe print, the machine-readable zone and the chip should agree; disagreement is surfaced as a fraud signal rather than passed silently.
- Bind the holderCompare a live selfie against the permit photo (or the chip’s signed image) with face match and liveness.
UK note: BRPs and the move to eVisasThe UK has transitioned from the physical biometric residence permit to the digital eVisa. A UK right-to-work or right-to-rent check now uses the eVisa share-code route, not the card. Zanyara can still read a BRP that a person holds, and residence-permit reading remains directly relevant for the EU and other countries that continue to issue physical permits.
Frequently asked questions
- What is a residence permit and how is it different from a passport?
- A residence permit is a card a country issues to a foreign national to evidence their right to live, work or study there — the EU’s standard-format residence permit and the UK biometric residence permit (BRP) are examples. Like a passport it usually carries a machine-readable zone, and many carry an eMRTD chip, so it can be read and authenticated the same way.
- Can Zanyara read the chip in a residence permit?
- Where the permit carries an eMRTD chip, yes — Zanyara reads it on the applicant’s phone and runs server-side passive authentication (signature, data-group hashes and the CSCA certificate chain), exactly as for an ePassport. Permits without a chip fall back to visual and machine-readable-zone checks.
- Does the UK still issue biometric residence permits?
- No. The UK has moved to eVisas — a digital record of immigration status held in a UKVI account — and BRPs printed an expiry of 31 December 2024. Many BRPs remain in people’s hands and can still be read, but a UK right-to-work or right-to-rent check now uses the digital eVisa share-code route rather than the physical card. Residence-permit reading remains directly relevant for the EU and other countries that still issue physical permits.