iDenfy, a global RegTech firm focused on identity verification and fraud prevention, has integrated Handy-Signatur, Austria’s long-standing mobile digital identity and e-signature credential, into its electronic identity verification platform.
The move places one of the German-speaking region’s most widely adopted mobile identity systems within iDenfy’s suite of non-document verification workflows. Businesses onboarding Austrian customers can now confirm identities through credentials those users already rely on for online services, removing the need to request a physical document at the start of the process.
Austria’s population sits at roughly 9.2m people, and more than 4 million of them actively use Handy-Signatur across government portals, banking services and private sector platforms.
Within iDenfy’s flow, users are directed to a mobile authentication step where they confirm who they are with a passcode or an SMS one-time password, after which the qualified-signature-backed identity data allows them to proceed with the service they requested. For many Austrians, this represents the default way they authenticate secure online transactions.
Issued by the Austrian state and built on the OIDC standard, Handy-Signatur returns a deterministic set of attributes, covering given name and family name, that is not drawn from photographs of documents. Certificates last a maximum of five years and must be renewed before expiry; anyone whose certificate has lapsed must reapply in person at a registration authority. Austria introduced mobile authentication for public services back in 2011, giving it one of the longest eID track records in the EU, with adoption built up through tax filing, public administration and regulated onboarding.
The timing also matters for compliance. Under eIDAS 2.0 (Regulation (EU) 2024/1183), every EU member state must offer at least one EU Digital Identity Wallet by 31 December 2026, while banks, payment institutions and e-money issuers will be obliged to accept digital identity credentials for strong customer authentication. As a state-managed identity underpinned by a qualified signature, Handy-Signatur sits inside that framework.
Clients can switch on the workflow through dashboard settings, with no fresh coding or integration effort and at no extra cost. iDenfy’s system can automatically route users to Handy-Signatur or any of its other global non-document methods when document capture fails or is unavailable, for instance due to poor image quality or lighting, which the company’s internal algorithms have identified as a recurring cause of abandoned sessions.
iDenfy’s wider platform supports more than 16,000 government-issued documents spanning over 200 countries and territories. Suspicious cases are flagged for review by its in-house compliance team, which runs around the clock every day of the year.
iDenfy CEO Domantas Ciulde said, “Handy-Signatur is the credential that carried that infrastructure for more than a decade, and more than 4 million Austrians still use it today. Our clients who serve that market now have a direct path to verify those users through the credentials they already trust, without asking them to switch to other methods or provide a document they may not have on hand.”
iDenfy CEO Domantas Ciulde added, “Handy-Signatur carries qualified-signature-backed identity data, which means that the successful verifications are tied to a government-issued credential, not to a user-entered form or a photography-based surface. For our clients, that distinction translates directly into verification quality for the Austrian market.”
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