If you want to open an account at the bank or take out a loan, you have to identify yourself. The good news: with video identification procedures, identification can be carried out conveniently from home. The bad news: Not everyone in Germany can use this service.
Go to the bank quickly after work and open a new account? Difficult with the opening hours of Deutsche Postbank, Sparkasse and Co, which often close their doors between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. Not to mention direct banks like DKB and ING, which don’t even have their own branch network. Instead of direct on-site customer service, there are more and more online offers and apps in which customers can manage their affairs independently. But especially when opening accounts and taking out loans, banks are obliged by the Money Laundering Act to check the identity of their users. As a rule, banks offer several methods for this and perhaps the most convenient of them is video identification. TECHBOOK took a closer look at its advantages and disadvantages and discovered some questionable snags.
This is how video identification works
There has actually been another method of identifying yourself online since 2010, namely the electronic ID card. However, since many people still neither know nor use this function, banks also offer a number of other authentication procedures. The offline alternative is Postident, where you identify yourself in person at a Deutsche Post branch. The employees then send a written verification to the respective bank. The postage is often borne by the private customer. Sound awkward? In any case! On the one hand, you have to coordinate the opening hours of the post office with your own working hours and then wait one, two, three days before the confirmation of your own identity has arrived by post at the bank and is processed…
It is completely different with Video-Ident. All you need for this identification procedure is a video call-enabled device (smartphone, tablet, laptop, etc. with a camera), a stable internet connection of at least 0.5 Mbit/s and the necessary identification papers. With video identification procedures, the banks work together with specialized companies that handle the actual identification process. Some of the largest providers are IDnow, Deutsche Post’s postident portal, Identity Trust and WebId. The latter works with ING, Sparda-Bank, Targo-Bank, Santander and DKB, among others. For example, if you want to identify yourself at the DKB, you will be forwarded to WebID. There you enter your data and you will receive a link to a video call. A WebID employee will guide you through online identification, where you have to hold your ID card up to the camera. So make sure you have a steady camera and adequate lighting. Software reads the ID data and checks it. To complete the process, you will receive a security code via SMS or email, which you must enter at the end.
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Convenient but risky
Theoretically, this verification only takes a few minutes and – depending on the provider – is available between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. or even around the clock. In practice, however, there are also reports of longer waiting times during peak times and problems with the software and Internet connection. The user experiences seem to be quite different here. But still: Video-Ident is free for private users and is intended to prevent other or strangers from opening accounts in your name or gaining access to sensitive data. Between 2021 and 2022, Video-Ident was also used by health insurance companies for identification in electronic patient files. This procedure is also used by car rental companies and when booking holiday apartments when concluding contracts online.
Although Video-Ident enjoys great popularity because of its simple and convenient handling, there are always security concerns. Most recently, in August 2022, an IT security expert from the Chaos Computer Club managed to trick the identification system with a fake ID, as TECHBOOK reported. This can have catastrophic consequences, especially in banking and electronic patient records. The health insurance companies have since suspended the video identification process. The providers, on the other hand, see no fundamental security problem.
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You can use these documents to identify yourself
The video identification providers determine which ID documents are accepted together with their contractual partners, for example the banks. However, they have to comply with the regulations in the respective market segment, as a spokeswoman for IDnow TECHBOOK explained. This can be, for example, the money laundering or the telecommunications law. The FAQs of video identification services such as IDnow and WebID state that the German identity card or passport is accepted without any problems as long as the documents are still valid for at least three months.
A driver’s license and temporary ID cards are not sufficient in Germany. In other countries, for example Austria, you can identify yourself with your driver’s license. But what do people who do not have a German passport do? Here the providers remain vague. Basically, “almost all international ID documents” are recognized, writes the provider WebID and tells TECHBOOK: “More than 12,000 identity documents from over 200 countries and territories can be checked fully automatically.”
That is why not all IDs are accepted
The German postal service reserves the right not to support all available ID documents if the security features do not meet your requirements. On the one hand, this means the hologram, on the other hand it says: “The information required for the identification reason must be available on a permissible identification document and legible for the service employee (i.e. at least in Latin letters and Arabic numerals) and decipherable.” Wouldn’t that be a Problem that could easily be solved with software?
It is also said that for some nationalities, an official registration certificate or a utility bill, such as the electricity bill, is required in addition to the passport. With their help, the place of residence should be checked. However, the video identification providers do not make transparent which nationalities are affected or which ID documents are generally not accepted. A spokeswoman for IDnow explained this to TECHBOOK with fraud prevention. If there is a high volume of attempted fraud, the providers even put individual ID documents on a blacklist. However, it is precisely in the “active markets, ie primarily within Europe” that there is “strong coverage of common identification documents”. This also means that EU citizens can identify themselves with their identity card alone, as these have sufficient security features in accordance with the ICAO standard.
But not only the security features are important for video identification providers to accept an ID card. They also need the time to sufficiently train the AI systems and employees to reliably detect attempts at fraud. If a country has changed its ID documents, it is possible that a video ID provider will temporarily not accept this document for verification. Here, too, there is no transparency as to which nationalities are affected. However, private customers can contact their contractual partners, for example the respective bank, and request that their ID document be included. However, the factors “fast” and “convenient” are no longer relevant.
Alternatives to video ident
According to the information provided by the video identification providers, almost all people who have a passport seem to be able to use this procedure in Germany. But as is so often the case, theory and practice are sometimes far apart.
TECHBOOK means
“By now, opening an online account should be routine. And it is – at least for most banks. All you have to do is fill out a few details and the application is complete. Legitimation follows, but this process does not always go smoothly, as I recently found out when opening an account. Two methods were suggested to me: Postident in a post office or video ident via the provider WebID. Since the post office opening hours in my area unfortunately coincide 100 percent with my working hours, I was only left with the online procedure, which should actually be uncomplicated. But it wasn’t. After several calls over several days, I was finally answered on the third day – after a 30-minute wait. And although it was said that an EU ID card was sufficient, the employee explained to me right from the start that a passport was required for Portuguese citizens. Just fetched – and then it started. Pass held in front of the iPhone camera, but that didn’t work because the smartphone allegedly stretched the image. So switch to selfie camera and then aim to find the right position. After umpteen attempts it worked. Next step: slowly move your hand between the camera and the passport with your fingers spread. At that point at the latest, I not only felt like I was at a rave, but also thought I was at the “Hidden Camera”. Next up was the hologram check. But it failed because of the lighting conditions. “Go outside!” I did that too – and when my cell phone switched from WLAN to LTE, I suddenly got thrown out of the process. 15 minutes of waving your hand in vain, fiddling around and looking for the right angle for holograms. Oh well. Maybe it was just bad luck. It worked the next day: with the normal front camera and just a quick wave of the hand.” – Nuno Alves, TECHBOOK Editor-in-Chief
Those for whom video ident does not work as it should can still switch to the somewhat cumbersome offline procedure and identify themselves in the local branches or via Postident. The spokeswoman for IDnow also refers to the electronic residence permit, “which, like the German ID card, can be issued via the online ID function via Near field communication (NFC).” This means that – independently of national identification documents – an automatic identification that conforms with the Money Laundering Act can be carried out.
Although the video identification providers still have a few security gaps to close, the procedure is a convenient alternative to identification at the post office or bank branch for everyone with a German passport. But to all without a German passport, at least 13.38 million in 2022, additional bureaucratic hurdles may arise again.