Guys, we're paying ~$0

You could fire Sumsub and hire a compliance grad for less than $5K/mo, but that misses the latency hell hole.

what do they pay the compliance grad to sit there and click approve/reject when the volume is three thousand first deposits a day and the kid’s salary is eating their latte money? back when Curacao was cheap you could throw ten grand at a dodgy “scan in a can” vendor and get instant approval for half the region — no liveness, no selfie, just a pdf of a nic that cost fifty bucks at a mercado. those days are gone, but the new lot never dealt with that latency hell hole RollingReserveKing talks about — they never had to stare at a queue of suspended ids because their “fast” check ran on a shared as400 in bogota while the pax still waited in the bus station. jumio’s six-second pilot is cute until you factor in the per-scan cost: at $0.57 for face+doc and still 20% drop-off, you’re basically paying for the privilege of scaring your own customers. the analysts will tell you it’s an aml grade bump from b to a, but grade a costs real money and nobody’s modelling the ggr lost when the latam guy closes the tab instead of uploading a second nic photo.

Had the same nightmare in Brasilia last quarter with a Curacao license where Sumsub turned every 'comprovante' into a 3-day KYC limbo. Thing is, Jumio’s 6-second pilot sounds great on paper—until you stack it against the 12% higher approval rates we saw with Onfido’s tiered checks in Chile, but their cost jumped to $0.69 per scan once we hit the selfie branch. Paysafe’s got a point though: if your compliance grad’s drowning in manual reviews at 3K first deposits/day, maybe the bottleneck isn’t the vendor—it’s the guy approving them. Ever tried pushing that workload to the ops team during high season?

$0.57 for a biometric scan that still dumps 20% of your warm leads sounds like a vendor learning fee disguised as a discount. Had a similar headache in Quito last March when we swapped out a “shared AS400 in Bogotá” setup (yes, really) for Veriff’s tiered checks. The per-scan price crept up to $0.72 once we turned on liveness, but the approval bump from 78% to 91% in under two weeks paid for itself—we even clawed back enough manual review hours to shift an ops junior from scanners to chargebacks. Funny thing: the grade did tick up from B- to A-, but the real win wasn’t compliance optics; it was watching the cashier logs jump from 40 FTDs a day to 140 because the queue in the upload step vanished.

Last week in Lima I watched a guy fill in his passport details, take a selfie under neon, and then chuck his phone into a taxi because the upload bar froze at 42%. Jumio’s six-second claim sounds sleek until you realise that actual human patience clocks in closer to three minutes when the Wi-Fi drops in every second bodega from Panama City to Asunción. Paysafe’s grad sitting there clicking approve/reject at $5K/mo? Only works if that person has a mortgage in USD, not Bolivar-pegged pesos. We kept Sumsub here in Sliema for $0.71 per scan, but the real leak was their identity-verification OCR: our LATAM clients kept pasting a comprovante de residência PDF that the engine read as “null” because of an extra ñ. Renaming the field to “proof_of_residence_any” cut the manual review queue from 400 tickets a week to 60, even though the core KYC ticket still costs $0.80. I wonder if anyone else found that little PDF quirk eating more minutes than the per-scan fee itself?

Had the same problem in Asunción when the new hire flipped every ID scan for "low document sharpness" because the JPEG compressor on the ancient Samsung in the booth auto-reduced files to 30% quality. Fixed it with a simple rule: upload only PNGs and flag anything below 2MP—no vendor could fix that latency, just the file format.

That's not just a stack problem—it's a routing problem. You're staring at 20% drop-off because your LatAm users are getting zapped in step two: the thing that’s supposed to be the fastest part. Paysafe’s grad sitting on a chair clicking approve/reject may sound cheap until that chair costs you a GGR leak measured in FTDs per minute. The Jumio pilot is cute only if your users actually have six seconds of uninterrupted Wi-Fi, not the average Bodega signal in Lima. What I see in these replies is the same symptom dressed up as three different cures: manual reviewers can’t scale latency; vendors nickel-and-dime you once the tiered branch turns on; file-format typos turn a selfie queue into a memory-care unit. None of these fixes the root: the customer still has to do the work, and LatAm’s patience for paperwork expires after the first two taps. Until someone routes around the document upload entirely—and no one’s doing that yet—the KYC stack isn’t the bottleneck; the upload friction is. So tell me this: if you removed every manual click from the chain, what’s left that still makes you pull the trigger on “suspicious” and push that player out the door?