CBA onboards customers with NFC scans of ePassports

Commonwealth Bank’s new customer onboarding system that uses near field communications (NFC) technology to read ePassport chip information for user identification is fully operational, the financial institution said.

General manager of customer identity and digital security Sascha Thiel told ITnews that the system has been up and running since January this year, with over 2700 new customers onboarded with the NFC chip scanning system.

CBA spent six months developing the system that takes advantage of modern ePassports having NFC chips in them that store holders’ biometric information, Thiel said.

The NFC scanning lets the bank onboard customers with a single document.

Thiel said this compares to multi-document combinations required under conventional flows, and said customers can complete the process in as little as one minute.

While Thiel didn’t provide details on which technology partners the bank used to develop the NFC scanning, the onboarding flows are designed by the bank and not handed over to a third-party provider.

CBA uses "a number of big identity providers under the hood as part of our tech stack," Thiel added.

Instead, the NFC scanning takes place with the CBA app for Apple's iOS and Google's Android operating systems.

The system is compliant with Australian privacy legislation and banking regulations for know your customer / anti-money laundering (KYC/AML) requirements, Thiel added.

For the verification, the ePassport biometric, the chip photo, is matched against a customer selfie during onboarding, and neither image is retained.

"The biometric is not retained or stored by CommBank," Thiel said.

"It is used solely for the purpose of unlocking and verifying that government issued biometric or photograph."

Thiel claimed CBA is the first bank in Australia with an NFC-based customer onboarding system.

It is initially available for Australian customers, but will be expanded to migrants moving to the country and overseas students.

While the technology is emerging in the Australian market, overseas retail banks have used NFC ePassport scanning for KYC onboarding for several years now.

In Europe, neobanks have used NFC verification of customers with biometric passports, along with the European Union’s eIDAS harmonised, regulatory identity framework.

ReadID (Inverid/Signicat) and similar platforms are used by banks in the Nordic countries and in the Benelux group of economies.