In April 2020, the Swiss Federal Council issued a temporary Covid-19 based adjustment of the Federal Ordinance VZertES based on the Swiss Federal Act on the Signature SigE (ZertES). This new regulation made it possible to register for the qualified electronic signature (QES) by video identification, even outside the application by financial intermediaries (e.g. banks). As the Corona situation has changed, the Swiss Federal Council will most likely not extend the temporary VZertES regulation adjustment further, so that the exemption will be lifted from 2 October 2020. As a result, all registrations made by video in Switzerland by the Smart Registration Service (SRS) and not by video identification of financial intermediaries in the period from April to October 2020 will no longer be approved for qualified electronic signature (QES) according to SigE/ZertES, but only for advanced electronic signatures. This means that all these signatories must re-register in order to receive a QES for the Swiss legal area again. This can easily be carried out by the signers in certain Swisscom shops in Switzerland throughout the country or at RA offices that use Swisscom's RA app.

The registrations for the QES applicable in the European legal area in accordance with the eIDAS Regulation remain in place, so no new registration is required here.

Please inform your customers and partners in Switzerland if a video identification, for example, via our video identification landing page or through another SRS provider was performed and a signature according to ZertES (Switzerland) is still necessary.

New wildcards or templates now allow the retrieval of the Distinguished Name from the RA service in the signature request. This means that a person has been identified with the RA app or a Smart Registration Service service (e.g. video identification). This eliminates the problem that at the time of the signature request the name of the signer was often not reproduced exactly as specified during registration, resulting in an error message. Details can be found in the new Reference Guide and in particular here: https://github.com/SCS-CBU-CED-IAM/AIS/wiki/Distinguished-Name:-Use-of-Evidence-Attributes

Now that validator.ch has adapted its validation to our new qualified combined time stamp CH/EU, we will activate the new timestamp service again on June 29th in the afternoon between 1-3 p.m. A suspension of the service of several seconds may be expected during the switchover. The new time stamp will also be published in the Trust List in the EU in the following months. Since these are official procedures, Swisscom cannot give an exact timeline for this.