When you think about identity verification, you might think first of banks, airports, government buildings — some of the most critical processes in society. But USA Fencing must contend with its own identity verification challenges: ensuring tens of thousands of athletes compete in the right age categories and qualify for the right events, under a process that parents can trust.
USA Fencing, a nonprofit organization, is the official governing body for fencing in the United States, responsible for training and selecting athletes who represent Team USA in both the Olympic and Paralympic Games. It has more than 50,000 members, with fencers ranging in age from under 8 years old to 80 and beyond.
Brad Suchorski, director of membership, service, and growth at USA Fencing, tells Dark Reading that identity is critical to get right because the integrity of the competition is at stake.
“When somebody is competing at a USA Fencing-sanctioned competition, they know that they’re competing in the right age categories,” he explains. “Everyone who they’re competing against is who they’re saying they are.”
This is, of course, important from a player safety standpoint, but while safety is paramount, Suchorski also emphasized fairness. Whether it happened through cheating or clerical error, a player competing under the incorrect nationality, in the wrong age range, or with an incorrect number of qualifying points has a cascading impact on the integrity of amateur fencing as a whole.
Behind USA Fencing’s Verification Thrust
USA Fencing recently overhauled its verification process and partnered with Jumio, an AI-powered identity verification technology vendor. Announced earlier this year, Jumio’s role going forward will be to automate age and nationality verification for members.
First, a member uploads documents through USA Fencing’s existing user portal. But on the back end, Jumio’s AI-powered checking system detects document boundaries and provides real-time feedback if an image is blurry, poorly lit, or contains glare, prompting users to retake it before processing. Jumio president and chief product and technology officer Bala Kumar tells Dark Reading that once the ID is captured, the platform examines security features and looks for signs of manipulation, such as altered names, dates of birth, or other fields.
And rather than a simple pass/fail process, the system evaluates documents for varying risk levels. Unconcerning cases are automated, while suspicious or uncertain cases are flagged for further human review.
The need for an overhaul didn’t stem from any sort of crisis — the organization has had verification measures in place for years — but rather from a desire to improve operational efficiency. The old process was much more manual. Members and families submitted physical documents such as birth certificates and passports, and customer service personnel, spread thin during busy competitive periods, would need to go through each set of documents to perform the verifications. Weekends and holidays delayed processing, as well.
“If somebody previously submitted a document at 5:01 on a Friday, it wouldn’t have been actioned until Monday at 8 in the morning,” Suchorski says. With the membership base growing, “we were candidly experiencing a lot of operational inefficiencies which caused delayed customer service,” he adds.
USA Fencing streamlined age verification capabilities during the 2024-2025 season with the addition of a digital portal, which allowed it to verify competitive members once and retain the records for all future competitions. That efficiency allowed it to also extend verification requirements to all competitive members, not just those participating in regional and national events. However, even though participants now had a digital process, behind the scenes the verification process was still manual.
Now, with the automation on the back end, “applications are submitted at 5:01 on a Friday and actioned at 5:02,” Suchorski says.
Parrying the Challenges Behind Automatic Verification
Automation is nice, but it also raises operational challenges that extend far beyond convenience. There’s a need to protect data belonging to families and children, for instance, and to ensure that said data never reaches bad actors.
Suchorski says that from a family comfort standpoint, USA Fencing had already normalized age verification years before the Jumio rollout, so families were accustomed to supplying documentation. As a result, “90% plus of our community has adopted it pretty easily.”
He did, however, acknowledge that there were “concerns from our community about the data, integrity, how’s the data is being stored” with the move to an automated platform. So, USA Fencing provides members with documentation on how data is stored and how users can delete their data.
Jumio’s Kumar explains that when data is submitted for automatic verification, it is encrypted during transmission and at rest; if a user doesn’t want USA Fencing to retain that data, they can submit a deletion request, and Jumio will “immediately honor that.”
“Folks are trusting us with their data, and this is ultra-sensitive data, and so we have a responsibility to society to make sure we’re doing this right,” he says. “The way our systems are built is that the data is used only for the purpose that it is built for.”
Suchorski expressed satisfaction with how the partnership was going in these early days. About 96% of submissions successfully pass through the automated workflow, while 4% are routed to manual review. Staff spot-checks a handful of the successfully automated applications each week as a failsafe, too, and “out of the ones that we’ve checked, all of them are verified correctly.”
Automating the process has saved staff weeks of manual review time, the membership director says, and the organization has not yet received any complaints from clubs or event organizers about incorrect verifications. For Suchorski, ultimately, the broader objective remains unchanged: “It’s very important to make sure the integrity of the competition is front and center.”
