ID accepted for account creation for a 16 year old

Hi,

My brother wants to sign up to Monzo and is 16. His passport expired a couple of years ago and I’ve been told it must be active to be ID (that seems really petty)!

This means my brother will have to spend a lot of money and time getting a new passport and yet he has a birth certificate and an existing bank account and bills in his name etc… Which could prove his ID very quickly!

I would like to suggest some sort of less “strict” ID verification on people under 18, maybe have the ability for their siblings and parents on Monzo to vouch for their existence in top of the out of date photo ID / birth certificate and bills?

It just seems quite unfair for people less likely to have a passport / driving licence (young people)

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Not sure this is necessarily true but accepting more forms of ID would be good. I had to provide my passport & driving license to open my legacy account at 17 plus have my parent come with me to vouch I lived at the address I said I did on the application (no one has paper bills at 17 with their address on). So Monzos current stance seems pretty standard

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It’s an interesting point I hadn’t considered.

My son has no passport at the moment and while I’ve been accused of Monzo fan-boy things (to go with the Coral Crew thing), I’m not buying him a new passport just to open a bank account. Not even a Monzo account!

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I guess the pro with driving licences and passports is they are standardised documents where there are applications built to read and interpret them very fast and easily and more importantly electronically validate them. The same doesn’t exist so much for the likes of birth certificates where they vary across the country (older ones written by fountain pen, newer ones generally electronically printed) so harder to read and validate. I guess as Monzo grows they will start introducing more options to upload other types of paperwork to allow them to complete KYC to satisfaction

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How could Monzo prove that the relative vouching for the young person is actually a relative? Paper ID is easy to forge.
Not sure why they can’t accept expired passports like Flybe do on internal flights (up to 2 years after they’ve expired)

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I don’t believe an expired passport is considered a valid identity document for the purposes of KYC

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No, it’s not.

But I wonder why not

Monzo could definitely do better in this ID acceptance area. I hope now that they have U18 accounts this area will be assessed again.

As long as they are recogniseable in the photos I can’t see why but there’s always a reason.

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Government AML guidelines doesn’t specifically say if the passport must be valid so I’m now trying to find the legal definition of passport validity under AML KYC requirements but struggling!

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The relevant documentation is here, starting from Chapter 5

In 5.3.75 the requirements list that a ID document such as a passport or photo ID card must be valid. In order to accept an out of date ID document, we’d need to modify the way we carry out these checks which currently isn’t possible.

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Thanks @HughWells! :ok_hand:t2:

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I originally opened my HSBC account when I was 17 with nothing but a birth certificate. I had no photo ID - I had no need of it!

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It really is. None of my younger siblings have passports (they’re all under 16, but that’s beside the point for now). They’re unlikely to get passports any time soon, as my Mum can’t afford them.

They obviously don’t have drivers licenses, and probably wont until at least 17 - my other sibling (less than a year younger than me) doesn’t have a drivers license at all (provisional or otherwise).

The only reason I and my other sibling have a passport is because it the renewal was paid for by a grandparent, as we got one when we were young because she took us abroad then.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine that young people won’t have a passport/drivers license, and if Monzo ever offer accounts to those younger than 16, it’s going to be much more of a problem.

Liam

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But on another thread a 14 year old said the age should be lowered as most have passports :woman_shrugging:

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You mean those that belong to semi-rich families that can afford holidays abroad every year have passports.

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I agree with you. Or those whose schools do trips abroad

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It’s a tough one - passports and driving licences are all nice set standards which can be electronically read and validated. Much tougher for paper documents at the moment. I don’t think any OCR software would easily read my birth certificate! Without wanting to drudge up past conversations had ID cards been rolled out this would be a non issue.

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Were they available to minors? It was sorta before my time, so I don’t know anything about it.

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Fair enough! I’m only 21 but most people I know had a passport at the least by 16 but I can appreciate not everyone does and not everyone applies for a provisional license at 17 like I did.

So, I agree it could be an issue if they go younger than 16 year olds

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