Verimi and Yes merge: German industry joins forces for digital identities

Berlin, November 29, 2022 - ID wallet provider Verimi and identification service Yes are joining forces. This was agreed today by leading companies from the credit and insurance industries as well as from the mobility and telecommunications sectors.

This merger is intended to join forces for the further development of a digital identity ecosystem in Germany. Twenty-five companies are involved in the joint company, and other partners are supporting the initiative, which is intended to accelerate digitization in Germany.

"An ID wallet that is widely anchored in the economy is urgently needed to make business processes more efficient and to be able to take the user experience for German citizens to a new level. With Verimi and Yes, we have already done pioneering work and are using these insights on the path we are now taking together," says Stefan Imme, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Verimi and Chief Digital Officer of Volkswagen Financial Services.

"The merger into a joint company creates a new business model that unites the interests of banks and businesses for the benefit of their customers," says Jörg Staff, a member of Yes.com's board of directors and a member of Atruvia's executive board. The digitalization partner of the Cooperative Financial Network is one of the shareholders of the joint venture together with DZ BANK.

In the future, the services of Yes and Verimi will be bundled in a single platform in order to further accelerate growth and offer all services from a single source. The joint same solution uses the infrastructure and processes that have already proven themselves in live operation at Yes and Verimi in recent years, and the same applies to the existing approvals and certifications. The solution is already approved by the Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI) for access to user accounts of the public administration and is compliant for identification according to the requirements of the Money Laundering Act. The ID wallet architecture is based on the principles of Self-Sovereign Identities (SSI). The individual encryption and the "privacy-by-design" aim to exclude any misuse.

With the combined reach of all shareholders, almost every German citizen will be able to use the joint offering in personal use cases in everyday life in the future. The three major partners from the banking industry alone, including the savings banks, Volksbanken Raiffeisenbanken and Deutsche Bank, cover more than 50% of the German market with a total of >50 million private customers. The now merged infrastructure of Verimi and Yes already processed well over 10 million transactions in 2022.

Users simply and securely store their ID documents, driver's licenses and other proof of identity in their ID wallet, their personal digital wallet, so that their data is always digitally available with just a few clicks. They can then use their ID wallet to conveniently identify themselves to acceptance partners from many industries. For this purpose, partners from the banking industry will enable their customers to identify themselves directly from online banking. Established initial identification procedures, such as the eID procedure of the German ID card, the bank ID, the video ID, the photo ID and an on-site ID procedure are also integrated into the joint solution in order to identify oneself directly in the application case at the partners and to store the ID data verified in the personal ID wallet. The joint offering is available as Verimi ID Wallet on the web and via app.

About yes: The identity service yes® is a simple, fast and media-interruption-free identification solution. With yes®, confirming the identity of a bank's customers is as easy as making a bank transfer: users order the data transfer from the bank's systems to the requesting partner. Yes® is offered to all online banking users of the more than 1,000 affiliated partner institutions of the Volksbanken Raiffeisenbanken and the Sparkassen. Yes® was developed taking into account the PSD2 and eIDAS regulations and offers the highest standards in terms of security and data protection. The shareholders include founder Daniel Goldscheider, Atruvia and Crif.

About Verimi: Verimi is a leading provider of ID wallet solutions and operates a modular wallet platform with the relevant building blocks of identify, login, pay and sign. For customer identification, Verimi offers a Know-Your-Customer (KYC) platform with photo, bank, eID, register, video and on-site ident methods. More than 50 attributes can be verified in the personal wallet, including ID cards, passports, driver's licenses and Covid certificates. The Verimi platform and two-factor authentication have been successfully assessed by the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) at the trust level substantial and approved by the German Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI) for public administration user accounts. As a BaFin regulated payment institution, Verimi is required to comply with the German Money Laundering Act (GwG). Verimi uses particularly high security and data protection standards with data processing in Europe. The architecture of the platform is built along the principles for self-sovereign identities (SSI). Verimi shareholders include Allianz, Axel Springer, Bundesdruckerei, Core, Deutsche Bahn, Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Lufthansa, Deutsche Telekom, Giesecke+Devrient, Here Technologies, Mercedes-Benz, Samsung, Volkswagen and, via GMB Systems, GDV DL, Huk-Coburg, Provinzial, LVM, KRAVAG, Nürnberger, VKB, DEVK and Zurich.

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