Important update for digital IDs in South Africa

The Department of Home Affairs says it has completed a significant upgrade to its digital verification system, boosting government and business services and paving the way for a digital ID in South Africa.

The department said that the upgrade is a giant leap forward for the processing and verification of IDs in the country. The system is at the heart of various private and public sector services.

The system enables various departments and services, such as the South African Social Security Agency and even the National Treasury, to verify clients’ IDs using biometrics against the National Population Register.

In the private sector, the system is used by banks and insurers when clients open new accounts or take on new policies, and telco operators when opening new contracts, etc.

Unfortunately, this system has been marred by inefficiencies, with failure rates on verification hitting as high as 50%, significantly slowing down identification processes.

The DHA said the system has taken up to 24 hours to respond, and when responses did arrive, they were littered with errors, often forcing a manual verification process, which caused more delays.

However, the department has now completed testing on the upgraded system, which it says has reduced the error rate to 1%, dramatically improving performance.

The system is now ready to be rolled out to all clients in the public and private sectors.

As part of the upgrade, however, private customers will be charged more, with minister Leon Schreiber gazetting new fees for private service providers to access the verification service.

Public service providers are exempt from fees.

The minister said that the fee hikes are the first in over a decade and will help the department fund maintain the system without negatively affecting public finances. The new fees kick in from 1 April 2025.

“The rollout of a reliable, efficient and secure verification service supports both the public and private sectors to improve service delivery,” Schreiber said.

“This marks the most significant upgrade to the Home Affairs verification service since it was launched, and will dramatically reduce waiting times whenever a client needs to verify their identity with the Department to obtain a social grant or open a bank account.”

Schreiber said that the upgrade “is of immense importance” to supporting private sector economic growth.

“When this vital Home Affairs system is down, slow, or littered with errors, it negatively impacts the ability of banks, insurance companies and other financial service providers to verify clients and conduct business.”

Beyond the improved times to conduct business, the minister said that the long overdue upgrade will also help the department facilitate the way forward for its digitalisation goals.

This includes the future launch of a digital ID platform.

“A secure and efficient population register forms the cornerstone of digital ID,” he said.

Since taking up office as minister of Home Affairs, Schreiber has been aggressively chasing a tech-forward approach to DHA services, and has committed to fast-tracking the rollout of Smart IDs in the country.

The department hopes to have Smart ID services open to all qualifying citizens, permanent residents and naturalised citizens by the end of 2025, with the ultimate goal of moving away from the green ID book.

The minister recently revealed that there are around 18 million South Africans who still need to get or get access to Smart IDs.

Schreiber is pushing for greater relationships with South Africa’s banks to greatly expand Home Affairs’ reach in getting access to these people.

In the past, banks have expressed concern around the reliability of the DHA’s back-end systems in providing these services. The new upgrade should go a long way in addressing at least some of these worries.