Veridas passes 100 million identity checks under Mexico's new mobile line rules

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Since 9 January 2026, Mexico has required every active mobile number to be tied to an officially verified identity, under rules from its telecoms regulator, the Comisión Reguladora de Telecomunicaciones. That is a tidy policy goal and also an enormous amount of checking, which operators had to get done without switching anyone's phone off.

Some of that work went to Veridas, a Spanish identity company that has worked with Mexican banks and telecoms firms since 2018. It has now run more than 100 million verifications in the project, for operators including Oxio and Altán Redes, which serves over 150 mobile virtual network operators. Peaks passed 6,000 checks a minute nationally and 3,500 a minute at a single client, with 100% availability by the company's own figures. Veridas says it serves 75% of Mexico's telecoms market.

Activating a line takes about a minute: the user presents their Instituto Nacional Electoral credential, passes a biometric comparison and is matched against the electoral database, after which the operator links the SIM to them. Veridas says the biometric evidence and document images are deleted as soon as the check is done, relying on what it calls Renewable Biometric References, encrypted and irreversible codes, so that verifying a country's phone users does not quietly create a new store of their sensitive data.