Worldline provides core components for Austria’s national digital ID solution “ich.app”

By Joy Dumasia

Worldline is supporting PSA Payment Services Austria GmbH on its journey towards becoming an intelligent transaction provider well beyond payments. Through its products WL ID Center and WL Trusted Authentication and extensive experience in major infrastructure projects, Worldline provides the technological basis of the new digital identity, a unique app called ich.app, which PSA will launch on the Austrian market in 2022. The foundation of the innovative ID solution for all users is their existing ID as a customer of an Austrian bank. ich.app will enable consumers to easily and quickly identify themselves with various online retailers and service providers and, in many other circumstances, without the need to exchange any further data.

Due to its central role at the heart of the Austrian payments system, PSA is ideally positioned to offer a national digital ID service. With the support of Worldline, PSA will provide Austrian businesses and their customers with a domestic data compliant and reliable alternative to logins via Google and Facebook from 2022. PSA has been collaborating with Worldline in payment processing since 2011. For PSA’s bank-based eID solution, Worldline is deploying specific products from their industrial business offering that have been adapted to the particular requirements of ich.app:

WL ID Center, a central authentication service, sends a user’s identity within seconds to their online user account, in this case, ich.app. To be used on smartphones, WL ID Center is combined with WL Trusted Authentication. This authentication solution from Worldline is PSD2 certified and used widely in European banks’ e-banking systems and for online authorisation of credit card transactions.

David Ostah, Managing Director of PSA, said: “In order to make our vision of a universal online identification solution for people and businesses a reality, we are entering new territory in many areas. This makes our collaboration with our longstanding payment processing partner in this ambitious development project all the more significant. We are delighted that Worldline will also be taking operating our eID services as of 2022.”

Michael Steinbach, Managing Director Financial Services at Worldline, said: “We are delighted to be accompanying PSA on this new venture, providing both our experience in developing innovative mass transaction solutions for both payments and the industrial environment as well as and our proven authentication solutions. We firmly believe that PSA’s ich.app will become the eID standard in Austria in the near future.”