On September 8, FinCEN and the four federal banking regulators confirmed that government-issued verifiable credentials, including mobile driver’s licenses, qualify as identification under the Customer Identification Program rule. It is the regulatory go-ahead to use verifiable credentials and decentralized identity to transform KYC and account security. Indicio Proven® provides the trust layer for banks and credit unions : it verifies these credentials cryptographically and binds them to an authenticated biometric, making secure remote verification straightforward at scale.
By Trevor Butterworth, VP Digital Strategy & Governance
On September 8, 2026, the guessing game ended for bank compliance teams. Five federal agencies—including FinCEN, the Federal Reserve, and the FDIC—confirmed that government-issued digital credentials, like mobile driver’s licenses, officially count as documentary identification under Customer Identification Program (CIP) rules.
Banks and credit unions can now confidently accept digital IDs for account opening, whether in person or remotely. Critically, this provides a new and simple way to tackle the rapidly escalating problem of deepfakes. With a mobile driver’s license supported by the ISO 18013-7 standard for remote verification, visual guesswork is replaced with cryptographic certainty.The regulatory green light is here to transform account access, security, and payments.
Acceptance is settled. Verification is the catch
While the agencies have cleared digital IDs for use, they drew a hard line on what qualifies. A verifiable digital credential must be digitally signed by the issuer, cryptographically bound to the user’s device, and protected by a biometric or PIN. It is not simply a photograph of a plastic ID. A scanned image can be forged; a true digital credential is mathematically proven.
This presents a new hurdle: most banks know how to scan a physical card, but very few have the infrastructure to verify a digital one. To do it right, an institution must confirm the issuer’s signature, check that the ID hasn’t been revoked, and ensure it is still bound to the presenting device. Without these steps, a mobile ID is no safer than a smartphone snapshot.
The Infrastructure You Need to Move Forward
That is exactly the infrastructure Indicio builds.
Our platform, Indicio Proven, provides the technical trust layer banks need to safely adopt digital onboarding. We verify credentials using cryptography and bind them to authenticated biometrics, ensuring a stolen credential cannot be used by a fraudster. We run entirely on open global standards, including ISO 18013-5 and -7 for mobile IDs, W3C Verifiable Credentials and OpenID for Verifiable Credentials.
Partnering with IDEMIA Public Security, we turn an authenticated passport or government ID into a reusable credential the customer holds and controls, with deepfake and presentation-attack detection built in. Because the customer holds their data, there is no massive central database waiting to be breached.
What FinCEN’s Verifiable Credentials Guidance Means for KYC
The new guidance also opens the door for non-documentary verification using credentials issued by trusted third parties. This is the foundation of “reusable KYC”—a model where a customer proves their identity once to a bank-grade standard and reuses that proof across different institutions.
This isn’t just a future roadmap; it’s technology we are running today. Indicio has already deployed this verification at a national scale for travel, border security, and financial services.
It is the exact infrastructure the financial sector now needs, earning Indicio Proven® Juniper Research’s 2026 Platinum Award for Banking Fraud Prevention and leading Frost & Sullivan to name us a global leader in digital identity.
U.S. regulators have opened the door to the same kind of digital identity solutions that the European Union has mandated. Indicio Proven provides a complete, end-to-end platform for deploying and verifying digital identities for financial KYC at scale with global interoperability built in.
Ready to learn more about how your institution can verify mobile driver’s licenses right now? Contact Indicio today to turn the new FinCEN guidance into a live, working KYC deployment.
