Home Affairs Launches Faster, Safer Id System For Banks, Social Grants

The system, called Abis Automated Biometric Identification System, is used by various institutions in the public and private sectors where checking an identity against the national population register is important.

"The roll-out of a reliable, efficient and secure verification service supports both the public and private sectors to improve service delivery. 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," said home affairs minister Leon Schreiber in a statement on Monday.

The Abis project kicked off in 2016 with a view to boosting economic activity by speeding up the ID verification process for banks, insurance companies and other financial services providers. However, the system has been plagued by inefficiencies in recent years, with users reporting a failure rate of up to 50 on their queries to the national population register. According to Schreiber, issues such as the system being "down, slow or littered with errors" have had a negative impact on the ability of its users to conduct business efficiently.

Home affairs said tests done following the upgrades, which were implemented over the last few months, show that the system's error rates have been reduced to below 1.

Few of Ramaphosa's ideas received mention in finance minister Enoch Godongwana's budget speech earlier this month. Instead, a bitter battle over a proposed VAT hike to fund a budget deficit between the ANC and its partners in the government of national unity took centre stage. The question of how Ramaphosa's proposed digital reforms will be funded largely remains open ended.