I don't know about the rest of the EU but France just has national ID cards with your address printed on the back! No need for anything fancy there.
In both Australia and Japan there are tax numbers used for corporate identity verification (remember: here we're talking about a Wise account used for a business)
> France just has national ID cards with your address printed on the back! No need for anything fancy there.
Is a scan/photo of a government ID that much more reliable, though?
Physical IDs are designed to be validated in person because they're hard to replicate. That's not the case for a scan/photo of an ID.
So a couple of things:
- I don’t know for France but for Japan one of the ID cards (My Number cards) have RFID chips in them. This means that KYC procedures can involve both scanning the card with your phone, and then doing some video “turn your head” verification stuff
- even absent that, video-based KYC flows (which I see a lot of) just leave less margin of error for fraudsters. And for people being honest, a national ID card is yet another way for someone to have proof, despite their other circumstances
There’s always going to be people in edge cases of course, I just feel like leaning on ID cards that many jurisdictions have is straightforward
One big problem I see with that is that, while almost all passports and EU ID cards now support ICAO cryptographic document validation standards, there's usually no publicly accessible revocation list for these.
Combine that with the absence of any built-in user verification (some national schemes have a PIN code, but the track record of that isn't great), and it becomes clear why these documents don't fully solve the problem of strong identity verification.
>Is a scan/photo of a government ID that much more reliable, though?
There is a DataMatrix barcode containing the same data plus a digital signature from the government. The Wikipedia page for this specific barcode happens to show the back of the French national ID card as its example:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/2D-Doc