Glossary

In this section, we would like to introduce our ubiquitous language used throughout this documentation for a better understanding of the entities you will be using and interacting with when requesting our API services and when talking to our teams:

Term	Description
Company	Client of IDnow (e.g. a bank) who uses the services of IDnow to verify the identity of their users.
Customer / Shortname	This value is a string that your company receives from IDnow during account setup. It is used in the request URL when calling our API. This term is also referred to as shortname at various places in this document, and as companyid in the API responses. One customer can have one or more shortnames set up in our system.
API Key	The API key is required for authenticating your application and accessing our REST services. You receive this value during IDnow account setup. Never share this value with anyone, not even with us!
Token	After successfully authenticating against our API you will get a JSON Web Token (JWT) as a response, which is required for any following request.
User	The end customer of the company whose identity shall be verified.
Ident	An Ident is an identification request. It is the object that you create via our API to represent the user in the identification process. IDnow generates an internal IdentID that uniquely identifies an Ident.
IdentID	The IdentID is the unique identifier for an identification request. This is used by the user to start the verification process. The IdentID follows the syntax: ABC-DEFGH.
Transaction Number	The transaction number (transactionnumber or {TRANSACTION-NUMBER}) is a value that you can define and attach to an Ident that you create. We emphasize this value to be unique per user and not guessable. You can use it to associate your Idents with internal data sets of your users. Transaction numbers also need to be unique per shortname.