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What a check is

The word "check" carries three different objects in Verity, and mixing them up is the fastest way to get confused by a screen. They are worth separating once.

The three

ObjectQuestion it answersWhere you see it
Entity checkDid we verify this?The Checks section, the party buttons
Provider fetch runWhat exactly did the provider say?The evidence page behind each check
GateIs there a condition here that ends the conversation?The Risk gates section

An entity check is a claim: "commercial registration was verified for this merchant, and it completed". A provider fetch run is the receipt: the actual HTTP call, its raw response, and a sanitised snapshot of what was sent and returned. Every check points at one.

A gate is neither — it is a rule evaluated over data you already hold. Gates run no requests. This is why a gate can be not assessed: it wanted evidence a check has not produced yet.

The two scopes

Entity-scoped checks target the business: commercial registration, organization screening, IBAN, domain, website, national address, portfolio linkage, contract evidence.

Party-scoped checks target a person on the business: screening, identity, address, digital ID, employment, other registrations. They run from a person's card, and they need a party — organization checks are run at entity level and the card says so.

The three roles a check can play

The same check type means different things depending on where it is configured, which is the part most easily lost.

As an intake default. Configured per country under Country defaults, it runs automatically when a merchant is created — and because it is configured, it also blocks approval until it completes. Configuring a check here makes it required, not merely offered.

As a manual check. Run on demand from the entity page. Never blocks anything; it is evidence somebody chose to gather.

As a risk input. Several checks feed the risk factors — screening feeds the screening factor, the registration feeds registration age and activities, portfolio linkage feeds its own factor. A check that never ran leaves its factor on the fallback score, which is what the evidence threshold measures.

What a check status means

StatusMeans
pendingQueued, not started
runningIn flight
completedThe provider answered
failedThe call failed — no evidence was produced

completed is not passed

A completed check means the provider answered, not that the answer was good. A completed screening check can carry a sanctions hit. Read the result, not the status.

Retries

Retrying creates a new check; the failed one stays as history. Intake posture reads only the most recent run of each type, so a successful retry clears the failure — an entity is never locked out by a transient provider error.

When a check will not run

Verity refuses rather than sending a request it knows will fail: a person with no date of birth in the calendar the service matches on, a passport-only person for a registry lookup that needs a nationality code, an IBAN check with no IBAN. In each case the button says what is missing.

That refusal is deliberate. A request sent to fail produces a failed check, which then blocks approval and looks like a provider problem — when the real problem is a missing input.