The Department of Home Affairs launched My Home Affairs Online on Monday at a media event at Canal Walk in Cape Town, a tool for finding which bank branches actually offer smart ID services. There are 372 participating branches now across Capitec, Absa, FNB and Standard Bank.

You pick your bank under Locate a Partner Branch and enter a city, suburb, province or postal code. FNB said on the day that it has processed more than 14,000 smart IDs under the model and will offer the service at 240 branches by year-end.

The Digital Partnership went live on 9 March, up from just 32 branches under the previous model. In its first four and a half months, it processed over 385,000 applications and took the smart ID footprint from 214 locations to 541. The target is roughly 750 bank branches by year-end, close to 1,000 service points once the department's own 214 offices are counted, in a country of 63 million.

About 16 million South Africans still hold the green barcoded ID book, in use since 1986, which the department describes as the most defrauded identity document on the continent. Home Affairs issued a record four million smart IDs in 2025/26, some 1.3 million above the previous annual average.

Stuff reported the launch and FNB's acceleration plans. SAnews notes passports, first-time smart ID applications and eventual home delivery of documents are all queued to join the partnership, while ITWeb points to a 2026 identity fraud report calling the legacy green ID book the country's single biggest identity fraud vulnerability.

A branch finder is not a headline, and that is more or less the point. The bottleneck on retiring the green ID was never public appetite; it was access, and the fix has been distribution rather than technology.

Use infrastructure that already exists, already keeps its queues under control and already verifies identity for its own commercial reasons. Schreiber says it happened without extra headcount or budget, which is the part other departments should be made to explain.

The honest caveat is that bank branch networks are not evenly spread, and the people most likely to still be carrying a green ID book are the least likely to live near one of 372 branches, which is what the Absa mobile unit is meant to patch. Still, as a template for South African service delivery, partnering with private distribution instead of building your own is the most convincing example in years.

You might also like our piece on digital stokvel tech, our case for small business reform in South Africa, and the latest SA startup news.

Get more SA tech and business news and subscribe to The Open Letter.