FinHub Identity Desk
KYC & verification · 15 December 2025 · 8 min read
Last updated 16 August 2026
Video KYC lets a financial institution complete full customer verification remotely — no branch visit, no courier of documents. In India it has a specific regulatory name, V-CIP (Video-based Customer Identification Process), and a specific set of rules. This guide explains what Video KYC is, the RBI requirements it has to satisfy, how the process runs end to end, and how AI-assisted VKYC changes the economics.
What Video KYC is
Video KYC verifies a customer's identity over a live video session that combines document capture, face matching and liveness detection. The RBI introduced V-CIP into its KYC framework in the January 2020 amendment and treats it as equivalent to in-person verification — which is why, unlike Aadhaar OTP eKYC, it isn't subject to account limits and can open a full-service relationship.
The RBI requirements it must meet
That equivalence is conditional. A compliant V-CIP session must be conducted live by a trained official of the regulated entity, include a liveness check to confirm a real person is present, and use geotagging to confirm the customer is physically in India (rejecting spoofed or foreign IPs). The entire interaction must be captured as an encrypted, date- and time-stamped recording, run through a maker-checker process, and the account is typically activated only after a concurrent audit. Any Video KYC solution has to build these controls in — they're not optional.
The step-by-step flow
A typical VKYC journey runs: (1) a secure session link is generated and sent to the customer; (2) the customer authenticates, often via OTP; (3) documents are captured and read with OCR; (4) the customer's face is matched against the ID photo with a liveness check; (5) the live video is recorded with geotag and timestamp; (6) the case is analysed — automatically, or by an agent; (7) flagged or exception cases go to a human auditor; and (8) the outcome is returned via API or webhook and the account is activated after audit.
Agent-led vs AI-assisted VKYC
Traditional VKYC puts a trained agent on every call, which caps throughput to agent availability and makes the unit economics scale linearly with volume. AI-assisted (non-assisted) VKYC uses guided, automated workflows for the routine path — document capture, face match, liveness — and escalates only exceptions to a human auditor. That preserves the compliance controls while adding round-the-clock availability and far better economics at scale. The human stays in the loop where it matters: reviewing the cases the system flags.
Who it's for
V-CIP suits any regulated entity opening full-KYC relationships remotely — banks, NBFCs, digital lenders, insurers and payment or fintech platforms — and any customer segment where Aadhaar OTP limits are too restrictive or the customer lacks a linked mobile.
FinHub's Video KYC is built to the RBI's V-CIP requirements — trained-agent or AI-assisted flows, liveness, geotagging, encrypted recording and audit-ready logging — and plugs into the same platform as the rest of your verification stack.