The Department of Home Affairs has announced a major upgrade to its digital identity verification system, aimed at significantly improving efficiency and strengthening national security.
At the core of this enhancement is a more advanced biometric verification process, which allows for fingerprint and facial recognition checks to be run against the national population register.
In recent years, the department’s system has struggled with inefficiencies, including a verification failure rate of up to 50% and response times that could take as long as 24 hours. When results were eventually delivered, they were often riddled with errors.
However, the department now says those issues are being resolved, thanks to months of dedicated work. The upgraded system is expected to offer a faster, more reliable service with a significantly reduced error rate.
The improved verification process will be available to both government departments and private sector organisations, particularly in the financial sector, enabling them to confirm client identities using biometric data.
Minister Leon Schreiber highlighted the importance of this upgrade, calling it long overdue and a vital step towards realising the government’s vision of a fully digital ID system.
“This marks the most significant upgrade to the Home Affairs verification service since it was launched,” said Schreiber.
“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.”
He added that testing has shown the new system to be not only significantly faster, but also far more accurate, achieving an error rate of less than one percent.
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