Banks: ID cards ‘have been stripped of useful features’
Nick Heath writes on the Silicon.com web site:
While the Home Office is hoping ID cards will one day be used for everything from claiming benefits to opening bank accounts, the UK financial services industry has its doubts over how useful the cards will prove.
The UK payments association Apacs – whose members includes the UK’s major high street banks – is worried that security features that would have made the card useful for checking identity in large money transfers and online transactions have been stripped from the scheme.
Head of security for Apacs Colin Whittaker told a conference hosted by the BCS Security Forum yesterday: “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 online capabilities that we were hoping were going to be present are unlikely to be there for the foreseeable future.”
