Compliant identity verification for Australia

Introduction

Australia's regulatory landscape for identity verification is shaped by a mature and prescriptive anti‑money laundering and counter‑terrorism financing (AML/CTF) regime overseen by the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC), the country's financial intelligence unit. Reporting entities (such as banks and financial institutions) must undertake initial customer due diligence before providing any designated services. This includes taking reasonable steps to establish that an individual customer is the person they claim to be, identifying the customer's ML/TF risk, collecting KYC information appropriate to that risk and verifying appropriate KYC information using reliable and independent data.

Entrust offers an identity verification solution that can be tailored to enable customers to meet these regulatory requirements, available for integration through Workflow Studio.

Australian compliance requirements

Australia requires regulated entities to collect and verify a customer's full name and either their date of birth or residential address, using verification methods appropriate to the ML/TF risk.

AUSTRAC guidance provides examples of acceptable ways to verify an individual's identity consistent with the AML/CTF Act using reliable and independent data. The verification process can either use documentation or electronic data and include:

• Document-based verification: Supports the verification of either one original primary photographic identity document (such as a passport or driving licence), or a combination of a primary non-photographic document and a secondary document (such as a birth certificate plus utility bills or tax notices).

• Electronic-based verification (the 2+2 method): Supports the verification of name and date of birth or name and address, validated against two independent and reliable electronic sources, such as the Australian government's Document Verification Service (DVS) consistent with pre‑reform customer identification procedures and the post‑reform risk‑based customer due diligence framework under the amended AML/CTF regime.

• Combination of electronic and document-based verification: For higher risk use cases where stronger assurance is required, identity document and biometric verification can be combined with electronic-based source validation.

Entrust's market compliance solution for Australia

Through Workflow Studio, Entrust provides identity verification capabilities tailored for the Australian market that can support reporting entities to meet their risk-based customer due diligence requirements.

For document-based verification, a Studio workflow that includes a Document Report task and a Facial Similarity Report task can be implemented to satisfy document and biometric verification.

For electronic-based verification, a Query Country Databases task in a Studio workflow can be used to define which authoritative databases are checked. This is configured by selecting the relevant tenant in the Workflow Builder, including:

• the Australia 2+2 tenant
• Australia 2+2 with DVS tenant
• the Australia DVS only tenant

For a combination of document and electronic based verification, a Studio workflow that includes a Document Report task, Facial Similarity Report task and a Query Country Databases task can be configured.

Below you will find an illustrated example of a Studio workflow combining document and electronic based verification:

The data inputs required for a Query Country Databases task in a Studio workflow vary depending on the tenant configuration. The configuration requirements are outlined in the table below:

More detailed documentation on custom workflow input data can be found here.

More detailed documentation on the Query Country Databases task can be found here.