Good news for getting your smart ID card or passport at a bank branch

The Department of Home Affairs (DHA) aims to fix two major problems with its eHomeAffairs service, which allows people to get their smart ID card or passport from a bank branch, within the next year.

In a recent interview with CapeTalk, home affairs minister Leon Schreiber acknowledged that one of the service’s major challenges was too few booking slots for appointments.

Schreiber said the main reason for this was that there were only 30 bank branches in the country that supported the service. That number has remained stagnant for several years.

To resolve this, Home Affairs aims to expand the service to 100 bank branches by March 2026 and 1,000 by March 2029 through public-private partnerships.

Schreiber said people should measure his department’s performance on this front by whether they have a bank branch in their area where they can get their card or passport within the next 12 months.

Many people have also reported not receiving one-time passwords (OTPs) to authenticate themselves when registering their eHomeAffairs profiles.

Schreiber said this was due to a technical issue with a system administered by the department’s ICT provider — the State Information Technology Agency (Sita).

Schreiber said that the recent gazetting of regulations that allow government departments to sidestep the agency when procuring ICT equipment and services will be a “game-changer” for the DHA.

“It now enables us to say to Sita that this is not working and we need an alternative solution — we couldn’t do that before,” Schreiber said.

“We can solve the OTP issue in the next few months, which we couldn’t do before,” Scheiber said.

In addition to fixing the booking availability and OTP issues, the minister has promised that applications for smart ID cards and other document applications will become available on their mobile banking apps.

Ditching the green ID book

The universal availability of the smart ID card is a key goal in the department’s broader digital transformation ambition, which includes the rollout of digital identities.

The smart ID card offers much better security features than the decades-old green ID book, which has become a popular target for fraudsters and forgery.

According to the DHA Strategic Plan for 2025 to 2030, it aims to discontinue the document by 2029. It also highlighted a few of the benefits that the full rollout of smart ID cards will bring:

• Reduction of fraud risk caused by dual systems.
• Enablement of e-government and e-commerce services through the digital enabled smart ID card.
• Provision of a single digital card that can store and verify all types of service licences; e.g. driver’s and gun licences.
• Instant identity verification by all service departments and agencies through a biometric-enabled smart ID card.

Home Affairs aims to issue 13.75 million new smart ID cards by 2030, which is 2.75 million per year. As of March 2025, it had issued about 29 million cards against an original target of 38 million.

However, issuing a smart ID card requires support for a live capture system to enrol biometrics and authenticate users.

By March 2025, only 209 of 323 Home Affairs front offices had live capture systems. Home Affairs plans to expand this to another 30 offices by the end of the 2027/2028 financial year.

Even if all goes according to plan, the department will still have 84 branches without the ability to issue smart ID cards with just a year to go before it plans to stop printing green ID books.

The department’s budgetary constraints and technical inefficiencies mean the successful expansion of the eHomeAffairs service will be key to discontinuing the green ID book in line with its strategic plan.