Berlin, 17 March 2022 - Verimi takes over identifying its new customers for partner companies. According to the regulatory requirements, Verimi's partners have various procedures. One is the identification via an existing bank account, which complies with the Money Laundering Act (GwG). Until now, the AML-compliant Know-Your-Customer (KYC) process required analog diversions, e.g., via personal identification models or a video identification procedure. However, With the new procedure, identification for new customers is much more convenient, efficient, and faster.
Certain sensitive services require unique user identification, such as opening a new bank account, a securities account, or concluding a financing transaction. Unique identification is intended to prevent fraud and money laundering. However, this also increases the complexity for users, especially when such services are moved into the digital space. Until now, analog transitional solutions were still necessary here. This meant an inevitable break in the user experience for customers, who either had to leave the house or wait during service hours for an available call agent to identify them.
The new procedure circumvents this problem because anyone with a bank account in Germany has already been identified for it in an AML-compliant manner. Access to this bank account is thus considered proof of identity, which can be confirmed with a reference transfer. According to the AML-act, the reference transfer must still be coupled with a qualified electronic signature. Swisscom Trust Services takes care of this.
Verimi users overlook the complexity in the background. Suppose they want to identify themselves as a Verimi partner company. In that case, they only have to initiate the reference transfer and briefly confirm the QES through an SMS TAN. This completes the identification in real time, and the customer is directly forwarded to the user journey with the partner. At the same time, Verimi users automatically save their verified identity data in the Verimi ID Wallet for future use. In future identification processes, they can identify themselves directly from the ID Wallet in an AML-compliant manner. The procedure is already used in practice by several business partners of Verimi.
"We had a precisely defined challenge: to generate a qualified electronic signature from a purely digital process, i.e., entirely without the physical ID. Swisscom Trust Services was able to provide us with precisely this solution, and we decided to partner with this established trust service provider," says Roland Adrian, Managing Director of Verimi. "Currently, identification via a bank account is the fastest and most convenient procedure on the market. Verimi thus offers an impressive reach and a process that can be realized completely on the web, i.e., without an app. This allows our partners to take the onboarding user experience to a new, fully digital level."