Operational Risk – banks doubt UK Government ID card plans

The Home Office hopes that the planned ID cards will become standard for validating all personal financial transactions including such banking areas as opening accounts and making major payments of transfers. It will only be their take-up in such key areas that the voluntary approach planned by the UK Government will work. Home Office Identity Minister, Meg Hillier, said at a recent British Computer Society Security Forum "We need heavy penetration in order to get the cards to work. They won't work if nobody has any idea what they are. We need everyone to recognise the cards from workers in the Co-op, to bank staff."

Plans are in place to test the scheme with airport workers in late 2009, pilot it in various urban areas in 2010 and to roll the scheme out nationwide in the following year. Cards will be available to volunteers from late this year and the price has been fixed at £30 until 2011. It is planned to have machines in high street businesses which will take fingerprint and facial scans stored on the cards and the National Identity Register.

However the UK high street banks payments association, APACS, is concerned that necessary security features that would have allowed the card to be used for checking identity in large money transfers and online transactions have been removed from the scheme.

Head of Security at APACS, Colin Whittaker, told the forum that "Some of the features we were expecting in the ID card are not going to be present for the foreseeable future. There's nothing in the middle tech range which is where a lot of the user case scenarios - particularly in the financial sector - are going to give more value. For example, doing a high-value cash withdrawal, a counter-based withdrawal, where a financial institution asks you to put the ID card in a reader, checks it's a valid card and takes a pin number.”

The Home Office is concerned that too many features will overcomplicate the card and delay its implementation but Whittaker said "I have some grave concerns as to whether we are going to get the services we want at a cost that is going to be meaningful."

Richard Mould, Head of Card Innovation at Barclaycard told the forum that he was not convinced there was a service in place that customers wanted and that was financially viable. Barclays had invested a lot in their PINsentry system for electronic banking transactions and it was working well. Mould said they saw no reason to switch to using ID cards.