How a charity gets verified in seconds instead of two weeks

The usual way to prove a charity is a charity is to ask for a determination letter and have somebody read it. That's a week of waiting on both sides and it proves less than you'd think.

What we do instead

Every registered charity in the country, about 1.96 million of them, sits on our side and is refreshed monthly. The registration number typed at sign-up is checked against that record, and the registered name is cross-checked against the name on the application.

If it matches there's no letter and no wait. If it can't be confirmed the letter is still needed and somebody reads it and decides.

The condition doing the real work

It isn't the number. A confirmed registration proves the organisation exists. It says nothing whatsoever about who filled in the form. What closes that gap is the payout account, because money can only ever land in an account that has passed identity checks in the organisation's own name.

One thing worth admitting

The check this replaced had been failing silently for months. The government endpoint it called refuses every request it's sent, and nothing anywhere reported it — so every genuine charity was sitting in our own console marked unverified and none of us knew. We found it, fixed it, and re-ran the check on every organisation already here.