Regulated Age Verification for Online Services

Age verification has moved from a voluntary safeguard to an essential requirement across a widening set of jurisdictions and industries:

• Online gambling and iGaming operators face age gating requirements in every licensed jurisdiction they serve, as well as license suspension and seven-figure fines for failures.
• The UK Online Safety Act requires age-restricted content providers to use highly effective age assurance, with penalties of up to 10% of global turnover.
• The EU Digital Services Act imposes comparable obligations on very large online platforms serving minors.
• Australia’s Online Safety Amendment sets a minimum age for social media access.
• In the United States, more than twenty states have enacted age verification laws covering adult content, social platforms, and alcohol delivery, while COPPA continues to govern data collection from children under thirteen.

The common requirement across these frameworks is a defensible, auditable record that each user was confirmed to be of legal age before being granted access. Self-declaration and credit card checks no longer satisfy regulators. Acceptable methods increasingly require document-based verification, authoritative data cross-checks, or biometric age estimation tested against published accuracy benchmarks. Solutions deployed in regulated contexts must produce auditable evidence for regulators, operate without creating abandonment rates that push users to non-compliant alternatives, and handle the full range of age-bearing credentials presented globally. This includes passports, national ID cards, driver’s licenses, and ISO/IEC 18013-5 mobile driver’s licenses.

Daon provides regulated age verification through a configurable workflow that produces auditable proof of age. The solution supports high-assurance use cases across every category of online service subject to statutory age requirements: online gambling and iGaming, adult content platforms, social media age gating, and online alcohol, tobacco, and cannabis sales.

Supporting 15,000+ document types across 200+ countries, our solution can extract age data using OCR, NFC chip reading for ePassports and enhanced driver’s licenses, and direct attribute transfer from ISO/IEC 18013-5 mobile driver’s licenses. Document authenticity is validated through AI-driven analysis of multiple security features utilizing proprietary and patented techniques. Biometric face matching with ISO 30107-3 Level 2 tested presentation attack and CEN/TS 18099 aligned injection attack detection confirms the person presenting the document is the document holder. Verification paths can be orchestrated to each jurisdiction and risk level through no-code workflow configuration, applying stricter checks where regulation demands and lighter checks where it does not.

For regulated industries already running KYC workflows, age verification integrates directly into the existing identity verification process, establishing identity and age simultaneously. Age can then be stored for access through face biometric authentication.