We are intending to do this with different SVU levels.
We have a lot of other stuff to do first but essentially we want to do something like this:
1. Drop the existing phone + paypal verification to bronze level
2. Add a silver level with automated ID check like OP has suggested. We may even use NetVerify (which we've looked at previoulsy).
3. Add a gold level with an address check by snail-mailing a hardware RSA key.