The Central Bank of Kuwait has ordered every licensed exchange company in the country to authenticate customers through the government’s My Identity mobile app before processing online international money transfers, extending the country’s smartphone-based civil identity into the day-to-day mechanics of cross-border remittances.
Under the directive, exchange companies must verify a customer’s identity through the app prior to each digital transfer and document all verification steps. Officials describe the requirement as a safeguard against impersonation fraud, where attackers use stolen personal details to move funds through remittance apps without the account holder’s knowledge. Running the check through My Identity ties each transfer to a device-bound credential that the user controls on their own phone.
My Identity, known in Arabic as Hawiyati, is operated by Kuwait’s Public Authority for Civil Information (PACI). The app provides a mobile civil ID card, identity verification, digital signatures, electronic authentication, and a document wallet, and it is already accepted by government and private-sector services in place of a physical card. To comply with the Central Bank’s directive, exchange companies must establish direct electronic integration with PACI. Larger firms are reportedly already connected; smaller ones will need to upgrade their systems within a compliance window set by the Central Bank.
The app infrastructure Kuwait is now pointing at remittances has been progressively hardened for higher-assurance use cases. PACI’s multi-level MY KUWAIT ID app rolled out three tiered verification levels in late 2024, including NFC-chip authentication that reads the civil ID card with a smartphone. That is the same authentication layer exchange companies must now plug into.
The new requirement also extends the logic of Kuwait’s biometric registration mandate for government services into private financial channels. It lands particularly heavily on Kuwait’s expatriate workforce, which relies on exchange companies for overseas transfers and is already subject to Kuwait’s fingerprinting mandate for expatriates tying Civil ID services to biometric enrollment.
No specific compliance deadline has been published in the coverage reviewed. The Central Bank is described as overseeing sector-wide implementation.
Sources: Times Kuwait, PACI Hawiyati
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By the Mobile ID World Editorial Team
