How does credit/bank card scanning differ from ID document scanning?

Credit and bank card scanning shares some underlying technology with ID document scanning, both use OCR and camera-based capture to extract structured data from a physical card or document, but the specific data being extracted, the security considerations, and the typical use case differ meaningfully.

ID document scanning extracts personal identity data: name, date of birth, document number, nationality, and other fields relevant to confirming who someone is, often combined with the cross-validation and authenticity checks (MRZ against visual zone, document liveness detection) discussed throughout this FAQ, since identity fraud and document forgery are the primary risks being guarded against.

Credit and bank card scanning, by contrast, extracts payment-relevant data: the card number, expiry date, and cardholder name printed or embossed on the card, typically to speed up manual payment entry during a checkout process, whether online or at a point of sale, without requiring a customer to manually type in their full card number and expiry date, a genuinely error-prone and slower process, particularly on a mobile device's small on-screen keyboard.

The security and compliance considerations differ accordingly. Card scanning needs to comply with PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) requirements around handling card data, a different regulatory framework than the KYC and general data-protection regulations (like GDPR) most relevant to ID document scanning, even though both involve genuinely sensitive personal data requiring careful handling.

Card scanning also generally doesn't involve the same depth of authenticity or fraud checking that ID document scanning does. There's no equivalent of an MRZ or check-digit system built into a standard payment card the way there is for passports, so card scanning fraud prevention typically relies on other mechanisms entirely, like the card network's own fraud-detection systems, rather than anything built into the card-scanning process itself.

ScanDoc offers both capabilities as separate but related products: its core document scanning solution for identity documents like passports and ID cards, and a dedicated bank card scanning solution focused on speeding up manual payment-card data entry, reflecting the genuinely different requirements each use case involves.