This used to be what everybody in Germany had to do to open a bank account or request a new credit card, until the alternative of KYC by video call became popular.
It's not efficient by any means, but in my view it beats the US practice treating an SSN as a password, together with bizarre "security questions" sourced from public records that some banks use as a "verification method". And no, "phone number verification" (that really only works for phone numbers with the big three mobile carriers) should also never have been a thing.
I really, really hope to see a usable-by-everyone identification method one day, as opposed to "usable by enough", with a sizable fraction of the population just being denied access to credit, banking, and more, just because they don't exist in the expected form in some creepy data miner's database.
Ironically, German ID cards support exactly such a method: You can just tap it on your iOS or Android phone for a "qualified electronic signature" as defined by EU law. And as a non-citizen, you can now finally get an "e-ID only" card, so nobody is excluded from that scheme! Unfortunately, I don't know a single person that remembers their six-digit PIN that's required for that feature...
It's not efficient by any means, but in my view it beats the US practice treating an SSN as a password, together with bizarre "security questions" sourced from public records that some banks use as a "verification method". And no, "phone number verification" (that really only works for phone numbers with the big three mobile carriers) should also never have been a thing.
I really, really hope to see a usable-by-everyone identification method one day, as opposed to "usable by enough", with a sizable fraction of the population just being denied access to credit, banking, and more, just because they don't exist in the expected form in some creepy data miner's database.
Ironically, German ID cards support exactly such a method: You can just tap it on your iOS or Android phone for a "qualified electronic signature" as defined by EU law. And as a non-citizen, you can now finally get an "e-ID only" card, so nobody is excluded from that scheme! Unfortunately, I don't know a single person that remembers their six-digit PIN that's required for that feature...